Math Professor Robert Lipton Secures $1 Million MURI Award to Help Improve Long Range Communication
Robert Lipton, S.B. Barton Professor of Mathematics at LSU.Photo Credit: Greta Jines, LSU Reveille
Like most kids, LSU’s S. B. Bart Professor of Mathematics Robert Lipton wasn’t interested in math.
“I was normal kid and didn’t necessarily excel in math in high school,” said Lipton. I wasn’t a math geek, but I’ve always loved science and in college I found that mathematics was the quickest way to get into science.”
Today, Lipton and his research team are key contributors to a national project to amplify high fidelity waves and improve long-range communication. He has been awarded $1 million over the next five years as part of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, or MURI grant, on Transformational Electromagnetics Research. The total grant award is $7.5 million, spread across five institutions including LSU’s Department of Mathematics, the University of New Mexico’s Electrical Engineering department, MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, University of California Irvine Mathematics Department and Ohio State’s University Department of Electrical Engineering. Lipton is the principal investigator for the LSU team, which includes graduate student Lokendra Thakur and post-doc Anthony Polizzi.
“We’re mapping what they call ‘the geometry of material interaction structure’ into performance and this mapping involves mathematics applied to physical problems,” said Lipton. In other words, Lipton and his team are currently working to figure out the math behind certain types of waves such as electromagnetic and radio waves, and how they carry over a long distances.
The ultimate goal of this research is to deliver high-power, high-fidelity signals for long range communication. The research could potentially have some impact on radio waves as well.
The MURI grant is an extensive project that has helped launch the research careers of a number of LSU students, like Yue Chen, the first student to work on the grant. Chen provided much of the theoretical ground work for LSU's participation in the project. He was was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Kentucky Mathematics Department from 2012 to 2015 and is now a mathematics professor at Auburn University.
The second student, Robert Viator is graduating this year and has been appointed to an IMA Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota for the 2016-17 academic year.
“In my work with Robert we have developed the mathematical theory that identifies a new and useful interaction between crystal geometry and wave propagation for a large class of photonic crystal structures. Such crystals have potential application in optical communication systems and in optical computing,” said Lipton.
Needless to say, the research supported by the MURI grant is making great strides in applied mathematics and has helped graduate students and post-docs at LSU build formidable research portfolios. The grant also reinforces LSU’s role as a nationally recognized center for applied and interdisciplinary mathematics research.
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