University of Michigan
U-M’s focus on interdisciplinary studies allows students to tailor their academic experiences to their career and life goals. As one of the largest public research institutions in the country, Michigan has thousands of exciting projects underway that encourage strong partnerships between students and faculty.
With expenditures in excess of $1 billion, research is central to U-M’s mission and permeates all 19 schools and colleges. U-M is a strong advocate of promoting collaboration and interdisciplinary research initiatives that involve faculty and students from across campus.
The goal of physics is to understand the behavior of matter and energy on every level, from the origins of the universe in the Big Bang to the interior of atoms in your computer screen. In seeking a pure understanding of how the world works, physicists have revolutionized our lives.
Some of the physics driven achievements of the 20th century include:
- Electrical power
- Radio, television, and cellular communication
- Travel to the moon and planets
- The transistor and the electronic revolution, including computers and networks
- The world-wide web: invented to facilitate communication among high energy physicists
- Medical imaging techniques like magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, positron emission tomography, and endoscopes
- The discovery of the Big Bang, black holes, and the accelerating expansion of the universe
Despite this remarkable record of achievement, great mysteries remain and fundamental physics research continues at a furious pace. Here are some of the questions now being pursued by physicists at the University of Michigan:
Quick Links
- Can practical quantum computers be built? How would they outperform today’s digital computers?
- What is the origin of mass? Why do electrons and quarks have the masses that they do?
- What is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, and will it continue to do so forever?
- How does the mechanical stretchiness of proteins like DNA affect their biological function?
- What causes electrons to flow with absolutely no resistance in some materials?
In all these areas of research, the faculty are assisted by undergraduate students, who in addition to learning about physics in class, are doing physics in the lab.
Many physics students have broad interests and more than a third graduate with double majors. Common companion majors in recent years include mathematics, astronomy and astrophysics, education, philosophy, and music.
As the state of Michigan begins enforcing new limits on PFAS compounds in drinking water, the need is intensifying for efficient, cost-effective treatments to address these “forever chemicals.”
University of Michigan researchers are developing a scalable technique for destroying perfluorinated alkylated substances in water using cold plasma, or charged gas. While most mitigation strategies focus on removing PFAS, this approach goes a step further. It aims to actually break down the PFAS and convert them into something less hazardous.
A growing concern around the U.S., PFAS are considered a dangerous legacy from the nation’s industrial past. The engineered chemical compounds were first introduced 80 years ago and quickly found use in a variety of applications—fabric protectants, cleaning products, paints, fire-fighting foams, as well as non-stick coatings for kitchenware.
Roughly 5,000 different types exist today, and most of them share the ability to remain in the environment for extended periods of time. Known as forever chemicals, they can resist breaking down, posing threats to human health on multiple fronts. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, exposure may be linked to increased cancer risk as well as changes in liver enzymes, decreased vaccine response in children, increases in cholesterol and heightened risk of high blood pressure in pregnant women.
“One of the reasons PFAS are difficult to degrade is they contain so many carbon fluorine bonds,” explained Terese M. Olson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Those are the strongest bonds that exist in chemistry. They take a lot of energy to break, but that’s what you have to do to make this compound less hazardous.”
When mitigation strategies simply remove PFAS from water, the byproduct of concentrated PFAS needs to be disposed of somewhere. Usually it goes into landfills or gets incinerated and, over time, re-enters the water supply.
Olson is looking for a more permanent solution, one that could be scaled for use at water treatment plants. Her search led her to cold plasma.
Cold plasma is essentially an activated gas made of energetic electrons, which have virtually no mass and therefore very little heat content. Here’s how the researchers envision it could work: When the plasma comes in contact with contaminated water, the electrons attach to the PFAS molecule. This makes the carbon fluorine bonds unstable, causing the molecule to break down into its component parts. The result is a release of carbon dioxide and fluorine gas, in small quantities that do not pose a health risk.
“Essentially, you’d remove most of these building blocks of the PFAS molecule from the water almost atom by atom,” said John Foster, professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences and Olson’s partner on the project.
The fast-moving electrons would also physically bombard the PFAS molecules, breaking them up mechanically.
