Coming to you from RGIS Studios, I am Anicia Antoine and this is your Midday News Brief. The Ministry of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development, in partnership with the Commonwealth of Learning, the William & Flora Youlet Foundation and UNESCO, will set a 4-day workshop on building capacity for the use of open education resources in the classroom. The move will help to reduce on the cost of textbooks and the material and the improvement in the capacity of teachers. OER has increasingly been recognised by the international community as an innovative tool for meeting the challenges of providing lifelong learning opportunities for learners from diverse levels and modes of education worldwide. With the help of UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning, the Ministry of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development is seeking to develop its policies surrounding the use of OER. The workshop was organised by the Commonwealth of Learning, which seeks to bring education and training to the all Commonwealth member states through the use of technology. A data-gathering tool is seeking to help institutions who work with juveniles better manage their cases for more effective outcomes. Ferriscribe is a mental health software and includes features such as appointment reminders, appointment scheduling, assessment and treatment plans, which gives all the relevant parties access to the same information. Recently, a refresher course was conducted for the use of the software. Director of the Upton Garden Girls Centre, Jacqueline Messiah Simian, says Ferriscribe is a critical part of the organisation's collaboration with other agencies. Every year, the Prime Minister of St Lucia hosts an independence ball in which the proceeds received are donated to several charities. Cabinet Secretary at the Office of the Prime Minister, Benson Emmanuel, presented a check donation of $4,000 on behalf of the Prime Minister of St Lucia to the St Lucia Animal Protection Society Slaps from the proceeds raised at the 2019 independence ball. The founder of Slaps, Pamela Duvall, expressed gratitude to the Prime Minister for the donations received. This year, the annual Prime Minister's Independence Ball will take place on 22nd February 2020. This has been Amid the News Brief. Thank you for watching.


Our speaker this evening, Peter G. Ramford, our staff at the System Engineering with Algae. Well, Peter comes to us with a long background in the environmental biochemistry. In fact, that was your PhD work that you've been working on for quite a while.  Well, I should be an engineer. Anyways, advice for the practical engineer. Well, we're glad that you're looking at the ways to put the science to work. And of course, that's what engineers do, make that scientific work, some practical work for people to use. And we're anxious to find anxious to learn what's what you've learned here in the recent work. Your recent work as technical director for the Algae Bioenergy Program at NNU. We welcome you. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. And thank you all for coming. It's a great pleasure for me to be here. And every scientist loves to get up and talk about what they spend all their days and nights thinking about. So I've got about 30 slides for you. I'm going to kind of go through them at a semi-legally pace. If you have questions that are just really urgent then you have to ask them.  I try to deal with all that slide as well as we can take questions at the end. A lot of people that contribute to this work are in the room. And I'll try to go through some of them on the slides and then maybe seem to introduce some of the other folks at the end of the talk. As Wayne said, my early interests were in environmental biochemistry. And right back when I was starting in graduate school in 1977 and 78, my thought was that biochemistry was eventually going to play a role at very large scale in terms of rebalancing systems that had become out of our own since industrialization happened on the planet. I didn't think I was going to have to wait 30 years to really have a chance of making an impact. But we've been reasonably productive along the way. We've learned quite a bit. And right now, the last five years of my career, I've spent trying to work out methods for scaling up algal biotechnology. Currently, the largest successful companies that depend on algal biotechnology are producing on less than 1,000 acres. And to get to these large scale impacts that look on paper to be very promising, we need to increase that by, one, probably, two orders of magnitude. And that's not going to be easy. So the bulk of my talk is going to be talking about cultivation barriers. But I'm going to try to put that into both the engineering and economic context for you first. And that'll explain some of the decisions that we made along the way. So in a nutshell, this first slide describes our overall thinking. The energy water environment nexus, which is what the EPSCOR NSF project is all about, is one that is both critical and imminent in terms of need for large scale new technology. And this word disruptive is an important one to define before we go too much further. A disruptive technology is one that's a little bit difficult to imagine currently. Current versions of any disruptive technology are a little bit half-faked. And yet, when the issues and barriers are overcome, they can transform an industry and put industries that have been in leadership roles for decades out of business. And an example would be the cell phone. In the early 90s, people could imagine a cell phone, but it was essentially limited by transmission towers and lack of miniaturization and software development and so on. But people kept working away on and then it's transformed our world.  My best friend's dad was at the work of the highway department, hauling flasher signs around. And he had, essentially, a walkie-talkie that allowed us where he took us over to see a San Francisco Giants baseball game coming over a Donner and Pats. And he was able to haul his wife and imagine it through on a phone. So that technology actually goes back a lot further than we might imagine. So that means that by analogy, we should be able to predict what's going to be happening in 45 years in the future. And that's what I want to talk to you guys about today. What I think is going to be going on in terms of new technology at the energy, water, and environment nexus. To put this into a business context, the algal industry at a large scale does not really exist yet. And that's because the economics don't favor it. And it's really a stretch to get there. And so when I looked around at opportunities where the investment and financing might be easier, I landed on a wastewater treatment as one of those ecosystem services that represents an opportunity to get this new technology off the ground. And that's because current wastewater treatment is an energy-intensive process. Even with anaerobic digestion and co-gen recovery, we're still needing to pay, we only get about 50% of our energy costs out of that kind of a co-gen process. And yet the energy in the wastewater itself, chemical energy in wastewater is four times what you need. So we're throwing an opportunity away. And so the idea is our goal is to identify a stream of unit operations that allows to do energy-positive wastewater treatment. And if we can do that, we can take the energy savings for the operation of a wastewater treatment plant over five or 10 or 20 years, use that as collateral to get financing to go back and do the retrofit on the wastewater treatment plant. So that's the opportunity. The challenge is, how do you figure out each one of those unit operations? What are they? How do you optimize them all together, not separately, but together so that you get a process that makes sense? So the first part of my talk, I just want to introduce the team and the resources. Some of the people are here. Tanner Schaub is not. He's an analytical chemist extraordinaire. He does our oil analysis. I won't be talking about his work today. It's a little bit technical, but I encourage you to invite him for a future science campaign that's some incredible stuff with his mass spectrometer. Schaub-Long-Dang is working with us every day. And some of his graduate students are here in the back on extraction and conversion of elbow biomass into bio-cold oil. Dr. Neumann Condon is here. You want to stand up? You can see you and Wayne Bedmore. He is also here. There we go. He's back up with the art. Civil Engineering, Biorecure Development, and Energy Analysis work is what goes on in Dr. Condon's lab as he is not. We've also worked with Sean and Ivy in animal science. There's another opportunity to use algae for single-cell protein for supplementing animal feed. Feeds into next month's topic of can we feed ourselves with what we can grow in New Mexico. Megan Starbuff provides us with analysis and advice and economics. And Omar Holkeen is a new professor in plant and environmental sciences who does a lot of metabolic modeling on course. This is the banner for the New Mexico Episcopal Project. The six projects are shown in the circles on the top. And the fundamental idea here is that the nexus of energy and water is defined in that first line. We need water for energy. For example, cooling towers from power plants. They use an awful lot of water. We use tremendous amounts of water for hydraulic production for the recovery of gas and oil from depleted fields. And of course, we also need energy for water, primarily for pumping and desalination. Tremendous amounts of low-quality water being produced through hydraulic production right now is just being re-injected into wells down in the ground. Two miles deep, never to see the lighted day again. And that's fresh water from ranchers and cities that are being sold to oil companies for that process. We are really mortgaging our water future for short-term gains in petroleum. That's a non-sustainable issue. And if we can come up with new sources of renewable power, we can drive, desal, plant, to recover some of the value of that water that would otherwise be lost. Another opportunity for us.  And CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We are intent on trying to develop CO2 utilization pathways. CO2 is a nutrient, obviously, for algae. Enhancing the CO2 content increases growth rate dramatically. So we need to identify waste sources of CO2 that we can use as an input to make renewable energy. That's a system that makes an awful lot of sense. And of course, nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer can be recycled from the hydrothermal lipofaction process. I'll talk a little bit about that as we move on. So in addition to the NSF resources that are coming through EPSCOR, we're also the recipient of a new grant from the Department of Energy called Realization of Algae Potential. I'm going to mention you as the lead institution on that. And I'm the principal investigator. And I'm lucky enough to have collaborators from Argonne, Los Alamos, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Washington State University, Michigan State, a company called Alginal Biofuels out of Fort Myers, Florida, PAN Pacific Technologies out of Australia, and a refining technology company out of the Midwest called U of P Honeywell. Our approach here is to de-risk algae cultivation. And that is the long pole in the tent, so to speak, in the overall process. And it's a complex one. So part four of the topic will be on analogy cultivation. We also have some funded work to look at low energy harvesting processes. And we're going to attempt to increase the yield of our biofruits oil through genetic engineering approaches, as well as increasing the growth rate. I won't be talking about that work. It's being done by Dick Sayer at Los Alamos and is also part of the New Mexico Consortium. And then the hydrothermal liquefaction is the other technology that we can use to optimize the recovery of biofruits oil from algae and get the yields to the point where the economics start to make sense. So the second part of the talk is basically to give you a status of where we are with all the biotechnology and why we're interested in doing it in the first place. So this is a slide that came out in the publication by a fellow by New Zealand, everybody named Manchester in 2007. It's been shown in a zillion times in conferences around the world ever since. And it just points out what sort of yield you can get in terms of leaders per hectare from different crops. And we can see here from corn oil, we're around 172. Two different yields of algae were way, way, way above that. The best one that's actually in business right now is the oil palm plant, where that can only grow in the tropics. And the oil palm productivity is pretty good. Downsides on that are that you have to clear rainforest to grow it. And the carbon footprint associated with clearing the rainforest is estimated to take maybe 75 or 80 years per question to grow there. Presuming on that slide that all the available forms of transportation are converted in 70s and burn and oil as opposed to gasoline or is it based on the present division between most of the gas engines and some oil there. So this is only the yield of vegetable oil. There's no downstream processing. But you said 50% of transportation fuel needs. Most vehicles, as far as I know, can't burn oil. That's correct. So are you presuming that everything would be converted to an oil burning engine? Vegetable oil is very easy to convert into a variety of different fuels with technology that exists today. The feed stock is the real issue. So for example, global alternative energy is a small company out of El Paso, LinkedIn, Sea of Alley Transport. They have a biodiesel facility. They use vegetable oil and cooking grease. And they produce about 14 million gallons of fuel, a lot of diesel fuel a year out of that. 80% of their costs are feed stock. 20% is the plant and the operation. So it really is the feed stock for these operations that are driving the economy. So if we translate those numbers into a map of the land required to display 15% of the US transportation fuel usage, and this is a slide that we borrowed from Sapphire. I'm going to bring Davis in the back of the room from Sapphire. If you want to talk to Bryn about the Sapphire operation, you can grab them after the seminar. The bottom line is that forest waste takes this much space. This is projected on the map of the US, obviously. Corn star, talking about 50 million acres. Corn ethanol, 90 million. Tree farming, 70 million. Switchgrass is a tall, rapid-drawing C4 plant. 90 million acres in here. So what you need for algae. Nevertheless, it looks small on that map. It is gigantic. And the amount of water involved is gigantic. And it is not a simple matter whatsoever. The New Mexico advantage is that algae growth is obviously driven by solar radiation. And in actual fact, we have too much light flux here. It's difficult for the algae to use at all. As a matter of fact, they evolved to take up more than they need and be wasteful as a competitive strategy to prevent competitors from moving in on them. And so one of the opportunities for genetic engineering is to re-equilibrate their light harvesting system. So they only take up as much as they need to grow. That's the good news. You can do that. It's been demonstrated. And the benefits have been measured and documented. The advantage is it's an anti-competitive strategy. If you do that, the genetically modified algae are going to be less competitive in an open environment. And the problem is going to be taken over rapidly by wild type strains. So you've got to figure out a way to protect your new strain from wild type competitors that are going to come in and remove that advantage. The big New Mexico disadvantage is water. And evaporative water losses in New Mexico are around 8 to 9 feet per year. And so that means that your water is going to become more and more salty. Your makeup water, if you're using on brackets or underground water source that's high in total dissolved solids, your salt is going to creep up enough. And pretty soon you're going to be growing only strains that can grow in the Great Salt Lake or other hyper-sailing bodies of water. Or you're going to have to come up with a new source of fresh water. In New Mexico, that's a non-starter. Everything is spoken for already. And there's really no new water. So water conservation was my first and primary design principle when I just got back into this game about six years ago. How do we figure out a way to grow algae in New Mexico without any evaporative water loss? And this next slide kind of demonstrates why it's important. It's from a paper by a friend of mine by the name Jason Klan, who works at Utah State University now. He did an analysis of the water usage and evaporative makeup water here in their miscolor. And he just looked at four different types of fuel products that you could make from algal starting material. And the bottom line is no matter how you slice it, no matter how you process it in your downstream, the water usage is dominated by your evaporative makeup water. And again, this is a non-starter for New Mexico. Good news for the Southeast and Gulf Coast region where they have plenty of water. Bad news if you're interested in economic development here in the Southwest. So I think I've covered a lot of this. Let me just jump in here and reiterate that what we're interested in are alternative water sources that aren't being utilized productively right now. They include both municipal and agricultural wastewater. And I'm thinking primarily about feed logs, dairy waste, and so on, and where there's both nutrients and water that's otherwise evaporating and being lost. We also have produce water from oil and gas extraction. For oil wells, the amount of water that comes up with the oil goes up as the age of the field increases. For gas extraction, it's just the opposite. Nevertheless, there's an awful lot of oil that has to be disposed of. And right now, producers pay to have it disposed of as well. There are brackish and saline sources that didn't need to be cleaned up. And there's a small company in New Belen, in Mexico, called Algorado Biotechnology. They have a business for doing that with algae. So those are some of the opportunities that we're looking at. And that's kind of the state of where we are with large-scale algae biotechnology. So part three I want to give you just a short introduction to the notion of industrial ecology. And I'm going to go into too much detail on the slide. The basic notion is that the industrial revolution was driven by being able to take a source material, do some manufacturing and clean up on it, and make a product that had value, and then throw the waste downstream and down the road and let somebody else worry about it. And while there were not so many humans, that process worked OK as the population grows and the waste products become more troublesome and we end up with environmental issues, basically industrialization takes us away from the chemical steady stakes that the earth established in the pre-industrial era. And as population grows, we have to begin to actively manage those. And on an industrial scale, we're talking about finding uses for every waste stream from any industrial process. And they'll turn those waste streams into an input for another industry, such that the sum total of all those transactions ends up being a net zero. And that's where humanity is going to have to go if population prediction is for the 21st century culture. There is no choice about this, ladies and gentlemen. We have to do this. And there are fortunes to be made in doing it. Fortunes to be lost as well, giving their own bed. So let's be clear about that. There's lots of folks that have already had great ideas that turned out to not work. So we need good science. We need good engineers. And we need those folks and disciplines talking to one another to sort this out. So let's kind of take a look and step back a little bit. How many of you are watching the new Cosmo series on TV? It's pretty good, isn't it? I'm sorry my tongue isn't that good. But I don't have their question. So I went to the internet. I found just a couple of pictures that I thought would be useful in describing this sort of pre-industrial ecological boundary. And in this kind of a scenario, you have a land environment adjacent to a body of water. And there will be waste coming from the land from runoff and the activities of plants and microorganisms that degrade the plant material and animals and so on. And that will runoff into the water. And it will carry with it nitrogen and phosphorus. That's what the N and P stands for. And what happens in the presence of water, N and P, and sunlight in CO2 is that you get algae to grow. And those algae can, in turn, set up an aqueous-based ecosystem in which the algae are eaten by invertebrate rotifers and ciliates and those are eaten by little fish and little fishery and by bigger fish and so on and so forth. And the whole thing is more or less in balance. And you never end up with a situation where there's too much algae for the ecosystem to keep it in balance. When population goes up, you end up having much higher productivities from the use of artificially derived nitrogen and phosphorus. We use petroleum and a process called a hover process to make ammonia in huge quantities. And that was responsible for the green revolution of the 20th century. Unfortunately, we put too much of that nitrogen into our fields. And it runs off into our aqueous system here. And now we have way more nitrogen and phosphorus. We end up with more algae than we can utilize. The algae, instead of just being eaten by the invertebrate organisms and them being eaten by the fish, the algae settle down into the water column. And they start to be degraded by bacteria. And the bacteria are consuming oxygen in the process of doing that. And then the whole system becomes anoxic. There isn't enough dissolved oxygen in the water column to support the life of the fish. You get dead fish. The whole ecosystem collapses. That's our dead zones. Sorry? That's our dead zones in the ocean. Is it dead zone just like this? At the end of every major river in the world is the result of this overuse of rivers as a pipeline for pollution. So this is also an opportunity. We can intercept these streams of nitrogen and phosphorus rich material, use sunlight and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and do this in a controlled fashion. And then work that biomass into usable energy products. We now are making laminate for rent. And that's the whole idea. But how do you do it at industrial scales? That's the key. And so just put one slide of chemistry in for you. This is a chemical equation for photosynthesis in which we have water and carbon dioxide and the nutrients that we've been talking about, plus sunlight, producing products over here. And the form of oxygen is just a chemist's notation for carbohydrate. Lots of other things are made from that carbohydrate and oxygen. And this is shown as one carbon because it's a balanced chemical equation. We have one carbon on the left and one carbon on the right. Look at, you can count up all the oxygens and hydrogens. They're balanced, too. This equation goes to the left as well. That's how animals make their living. Everything that we take in, eat, and respire into CO2 and water ultimately comes from photosynthesis. And the free industrial earth, these arrows that flow through those in both directions was roughly equal. And what's happened over the industrial era is that we're using more and more of the photosynthesis reaction as being overwhelmed by the respiration reaction. And it turns out it's not us respiring. It's causing the CO2 accumulation. It's that this reaction going from right to left is the same as it is for combustion. Respiration and combustion are essentially the same reaction. It's the respiration is done in a controlled fashion inside cells. And combustion is done in an engine. So combustion and petroleum is overloading this equilibrium going back to the left. And we have to balance that out. That's biochemistry and a very large scale solving the environmental problem. So the solution, or a solution, if we're going to tackle wastewater treatment first, because we think we can finance the plant retrofit based on energy savings, we have a series of needed operations in which we start with an area in which we're going to grow all the biomass. We need a harvesting system. We can fractionate that harvest if we want to. Part of what we can do is pull out the nutrients at this stage and put them back into production of more biomass. There's technology that the guys in the bathroom here are working on today to realize that return. And then from there, we can go to this process. There's a hydrothermal lipofaction I'll explain in the next couple of slides. It's basically like a pressure cooker. Heat up a liquid solution under with containment so that the pressure builds at the same time. If they were cooked with a pressure cooker, it rapidly cooks stuff much faster than it would otherwise because of the combination of the heat and the pressure. So if we tune our system right, we're going to get a CO2-rich gas. That CO2 can go back to our biomass production system to increase the growth rate. We're going to get a solid residue, that solid residue or biochar of several different uses that we can utilize, one of which is simply to burn it to produce the heat for the hydrothermal lipofaction. It's also good as a soil amendment. There's a variety of different things you can do with this solid residue and a biofuel. So those are the fundamental unit operations that we're trying to figure out how to make this work at scale.  Old Western refinery. And if we were to supply Western refining with all of their feedstock needs, based on current cultivation yields, you would take somewhere between 25,000 to 30,000 acres of ponds to do that. And right now, the cost per acre upon is a little bit difficult to nail down. You hear estimates as low as $40,000 an acre and as high as $150,000 an acre or a whole lot. So we're talking about 100, that's a lot of money. You have to fly 30,000 times either one of those numbers. It's a big number. So we need to be able to drive down the cost of production. We need to be able to drive up yields so that we don't need to spend that much money. It's a big problem. So harmonize all these different unit operations so they work well in concert. It is not a simple task. Now if you take a look at the current risk assessment for each of these unit operations, this is where we have the greatest risk. And the risk is based on the ecosystem of the open ponds or PVRs at large scale are sensitive to invasion by those little invertebrate grazers that I was talking about earlier. They love algae.  There's viruses that can attack algae. There are pathogenic fungi that will come in and wipe out the crop. There's a lot of issues around choosing the right organism that can survive at very, very large scale. Crop protection for algae is a fundamental agronomic need like it just like it is for weed or corn or tomatoes or anything else. And that crop protection science is in its infancy. A lot of the work has been done at Sapphire. Unfortunately the company keeps that technology under wraps and so they know a lot more than the rest of us do. And hopefully they're gonna make a smashing success out of applying the crop protection knowledge to open ponds to show that that can work and that would be a huge boost to everybody in this field. But it has yet to be demonstrated. And so the financial analysts, the engineers and the scientists all agree this is the biggest problem. Our thing is not a problem but it's a risk because the energy of harvesting is so hot. Algae don't get very dense in water and so you're gonna have to remove 99% of the weight of your harvest is water. You gotta remove it all before you can do anything with it. So that's why it's a high risk. The rest of the stuff is technology to deal with it. It's a matter of whether or not you can clench together your supply chain and the expense associated with doing it. So I mentioned several times now so we view wastewater treatment as a bridge. The design criteria for an energy positive system I've listed here. We need a, essentially this is how we're approaching it. We decided right off the bat we're only gonna try to do something for arid climates where sunshine is high and you have to deal with evaporative water loss system. So everything is tailored for desert or warm environment. So this would work in the southwestern US. It might work okay in the southeastern US probably any subtropical or tropical area of the world. I'm gonna remind you that there are two billion people in the world that have no access to wastewater treatment whatsoever with huge public health consequences. And so this is a part of the world that needs this technology. We're not talking about upgrading or replacing we're talking about new technology. And so even though I didn't write it here one of the design criteria in the back of my head is that you would want this to work at a village scale a city scale and a big city scale. And if you think about arid places oftentimes there's a lot of land available not too far away that isn't very expensive. So those are good aspects of focusing your design criteria on regions. So we're gonna use a closed plastic bag system that'll prevent evaporation, odors and will experience presence over heating. So then we're gonna need an algae that likes it hot. So where do you go? You go to a hot springs where algae evolve to deal with warm temperatures. And so I'll be telling you about a wonderful organism called the Goldy area sulfur area that fits that bill. There are at least three different energy products that we think we can tailor to a specific site. You can either get bio crude oil, biogas for distribution or you can turn that biogas into electricity. The technology for doing all of that is available. You need to focus down as the beach stock, the hardest thing and so on. We need efficient CO2 utilization inside our closed system and we need a CO2 supply. And so co-citing of this kind of a system with the CO2 source becomes a very important criteria. It's not necessarily something that we're designing for but it's something that will drive where these plants will arise. And of course the nitrogen and phosphorus are the key nutrients for algae growth and we need a source of those. It needs to be inexpensive enough to match your needs. So our current technology, and I won't go through this in too much detail, but the basic idea is you have a solid liquid separation. So liquids go into a tank and you bubble that tank with air or pure oxygen and microorganisms start to grow on the carbon in there. There's a fundamental imbalance of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in wastewater. There isn't enough carbon in that wastewater to support the utilization of all of the nitrogen and phosphorus. So when the carbon is depleted, the microorganisms stop growing and there's still too much nitrogen and phosphorus in there. So you put that out into the environment and you end up with eutrophication and dead salons and salons. So we end up having to go to a denitrification, which we take that valuable nitrogen resource and convert it into M2, which is 80% of what we're breathing in and out right now is nitrogen gas. It's inert, doesn't react well, has no value. So we take a valuable commodity to prevent eutrophication and we turn it into something that's useless. That's how we do wastewater treatment these days. You can do some energy recovery through anaerobic digestion, but you only get about 50% of what you need. In our post-technology, photosynthesis in CO2 provides the balance between carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. So you get in one step removal of all of the carbon, all of the nitrogen and all of the phosphorus. This word mixotropic simply means that you want to know you that can both do respiration and photosynthesis. Remember, respiration was going from right to left on my chemical equations slide and photosynthesis was going from left to right. There are plenty of algae out there that will take that thing in both directions. So then that will remove the biological oxygen and instead of your activated sludge microorganisms. And then you're gonna end up with a lot more biomass over here than you do over there. If you're trying to treat, as we treat sludge now, that's bad. But if you have a good process like hydrothermal lipofaction for turning that into one of those three different fuel products, that's good because it means you need to get to an energy-positive plant. And then the hydrothermal lipofaction allows us to recycle our nitrogen and phosphorus, sell it for agricultural production or make more algae. We're interested in ramping up the amount of biofuel that we produce. So maximizing biomass is the key to making the energy-positive wastewater treatment work. So here's a diagram about what hydrothermal lipofaction looks like. You basically have a biomass source and a sorority pump and most of this is involved in heat exchange. This is your lipofaction reactor and what you repressurize and heat. And the products end up going to a separator this whole bit here is about energy recovery and water recovery and this is kind of what the bio-cruise looks like. This is from a group run by a fellow by the name of Savage at the University of Michigan. He's done a lot of pioneering work on hydrothermal lipofaction. You can see it's pretty VISTA stuff. Nevertheless, technology exists today to turn this into jet fuel, green diesel, gasoline, whatever kind of fuel you want. Dealing with this stuff is not the right limiting step. Okay, last part of the talk. How do we get around the barriers to large-scale electrical division? And I've chosen two pictures on here. They are pictures of systems that were horrible failures. On the left there is a company out of Arizona that was working with the Arizona Public Utilities and they had a fair amount of money and a pretty illustrious group of founders and it failed utterly in terms of its promise. It's a picture of their bioreactors and they lost their shirts and went out of business in 2008 or 2009, I think. This one on the right is much closer to home. This is a company out of, and it's right across the river in Texas along, I don't know if you can remember, but the first one, not Antony, but immediately West of Antony. The company is named Valsent and that was a parent company and Vertigro was the local outfit. And the idea here was that he had a tangy bag so you just put him in a greenhouse and the idea was a great one in that you want to distribute the light in a way that is maximally tuned to the algae's needs and increasing the surface area. It's a little bit of a no-brainer. I think, well, you can go up and dilute the light. And so, conceptually, it was a beautiful idea. In practice, they couldn't find an algae that didn't form a biofilm on these surfaces that they couldn't clean up. And so, this idea also failed. It's being tried again by a company called Algenon out of Fort Myers that I'm collaborating with and hoping that they solve that biofilm problem. And I question them about it and they don't tell me about it. But they seem to be betting the bank on it. And so, we'll see. New technology does come along. We know a lot more about biofilm information than we used to, but it is not a simple process. And I am and remain skeptical. So, this is what we have at New Mexico State. There's three different types of bioreactors. One is from a company called Solix Biofuels. I was associated with Solix for a little bit more than a year as their vice president for biotechnology. Their main product was a system for growing algae in a water basin that allows for temperature control, optimum light distribution, and CO2 distribution, and algae grow like bunnies in this thing. They love it. They grow about 10 times faster than they would in an open pond. That's the good news. The bad news is this thing is ridiculously expensive. And the panels are highly engineered to make them work well, but they have to be replaced probably at least twice a year. And the labor and cost associated with building and switching them out didn't make sense at scale. Solix is still in business and what they've decided to do is grow these algae for high-value products, products that you can sell for thousands of dollars a kilogram. And then you don't need a huge footprint. You can afford to spend a lot of money on your system and make a go of it economically. And they're competing directly with a company called Solix on it. Their approach to getting around the scale of problem was to do it in fermenters. Forget about photosynthesis, just feed them sugars and gigantic industrial fermenters and get them to make the high-value products that you want. And so it gets a bit of a game between Sapphire and Solix. I'm just seeing if you can survive. These are the first generation algae and olfactory actors on the lower right here. This is their Fort Myers facility. Each one of these things is about 50 feet long. They have about 18 centimeters of depth in the bottom. They have a drive that provides mixing and just kind of a water boil that goes back and forth and creates eddies that provide good mixing. And we're in the process of setting up a whole field of these things that are just for the Fabian Garcia egg science center. These are the ones that they abandoned. I like them because algae never get on this surface. There's no fouling that happens here. The major risk is that they're over-engineered and they may end up having a biofilm in the bottom that could end up attracting critters that are gonna potentially make continuous operation difficult. We have no data on how long these things will last. For the amount of money going into them is probably they're gonna need to last a year to three years in order to make the economics work. So I think the jury is out on this one for large-scale use. It might work, it might not. Definitely not here. The one up here on the top is actually Bryn Davis' design from Sapphire. And it's the simplest of the lot. It has, basically, it utilizes plastic tubing that you can buy from moving air around in very large bean houses. It's already treated for UV resistance.  The enriched air inside this bag and this bag was CO2. And we're gonna basically have a bake-off between this design and this design out of David and Garcia. My money's on this one because it's simple and it's cheap. These things have some cool features too, but we'll find out. And I can't tell you the answer yet. So what sort of temperatures do you reach in those systems? This is data from Alginol, collected in Sonora, Mexico, which will be a little warmer than what we have here. And it shows the seasonal variation. This is August of 2009. This is winter 2010, summer 2010, winter 2009. And you can see these are the diurnal variations and the diurnal variations have the sun responding on nature to it. So the red lines define the temperature range in which the hot spring is algae and what I'm gonna tell you about next, light to grow. And between the green bars, the temperature range where an organism called chlorella, that we're also working with, likes to grow. Both of those organisms can be grown in fermenters at very high density. So the notion is that you could do a seasonal crop rotation between chlorella and galliareal and keep your production going year-round. And we'll be testing that out with our diurnal. So, goldieres, sulfur areas are red, unicellular, eukaryotic algae. It grows between pH zero and four to give you a marker. Coca-Cola is about pH two and a half. Lemonade is about the same. It's pretty acidic. Things don't like to grow with that pH. If you leave your coke out on the table top for a week and look at it, there's still a whole lot in there, right? It's not like lots of milk or something. That's good for us. They grow up to 56 degrees centigrade. They're both photoautotropic and metotropic. That means they can take that chemical reaction in both directions. They grow on a very large number of carbon sources. I'll tell you a little bit about that. In the next slide, in this Robisco discrimination, it just means that there's an enzyme inside of all plants and algae that fix CO2 into carbohydrate. And these red algae are really good at that. Is there a must to attack them because it might spend a sitting? Is there a must a virus or a part of an eye or whatever that would attack them? Yeah. So if you didn't hear that in the back, she's making the observation that acidic pH is, because there's so many less organisms that can grow, that whole ecology in that system is really simple. And so there's fewer viruses, or at least we presume, but there are fewer viruses, fungi, and grazers that will cause problems. So far, that's proven to be so. But we need bigger scale operations, run over long periods of time before we're gonna discover what the problems might arise. I'm not naive enough to think that there aren't issues that have arisen. And I think we need to know and understand more about the ecology of those Yellowstone hot springs than we know right now to be able to predict what might go wrong and head it off before it happens. But that's another grant and another agency. Okay, so this is just the temperature and pH limits of life. And so if you look at those two different dimensions, if you're way down here on the pH scale, and you're relatively high on the temperature scale, they've eliminated most of everything. That's the whole idea here. And that's what this slide is just to tell you. Most of the algae that's grown in the world today is just spirulina, and it can grow up to pH 11, 11.4. And that's part of the reason why it survives. It also has this curlicume ornphology that makes it difficult for the grazers to consume it. It's just little green balls, they can just sweep them in. But if it's a corkscrew, it's a little bit different. So there's a couple of different reasons why these guys might be the most robust of the algae that are grown currently for commercial use. So here's a slide on the different carbohydrates and amino acids and stuff that the grow the area you can use for growth in the dark. Here's a reference to the genome project. So we know the full genome of the area. And we know from the analysis of that genome that it has transporters for all of these different things from different monosaccharides, both hexoses and pentoses, sugar alcohols, glycerol, disaccharides, acetate, amino acids, polysaccharides. It is quite versatile in terms of what it can utilize. It's a little bit of a mystery as to why it's so good at it. If you look at the number of carbon transporters in that genome, it's about the same as what you see in wood rot fungi or other filamentous fungi that have enormous heterotrophic cannibalic capabilities. And why this caldiary is essentially equivalent to them isn't quite understood yet. Is that growing a chocolate cake there? I'm sorry? Is that growing a chocolate cake there? No, it just meant there was a chocolate cake is a source of sugars. Put the chocolate cake in some water, add the caldiary, put it in a dark, ittle girl. Oh, great. All right, these are electron micrographs of caldiary taken by a colleague of mine, Ursula Goodenoff at Washington University in St. Louis. This is what they look like when they're growing rapidly in a photosynthetic mode. And when they become depleted of nitrogen, they de-differentiate that chloroplast that shrinks mildly. And you see all these granules in the cytoplasm, that starch. That's just polymerized glucose. And you see these liquid bodies form as well. These are the sources of oil for conversion to biofuel. The great thing about hydrothermal liquid is that it could produce high yields of bio crude oil from either this material or this material. And that's important because it takes time for these things to convert into these things. And if you don't have to wait for that, then your land can be more productive. Your yields per unit time are going to go up. But nevertheless, we know that the genetics in biochemistry for synthesizing vegetable oil, which is essentially what these liquid bodies are, exist in this organism and it can be exploited by genetic means. All right, coming into the home stretch here. This is data from last year at the Fabian Garcia Science Center with Goldie area growing in the sapphire style photobioreactors, starting on May 18 and going through June 6. And they go through a typical lag phase or they're adapting to their new conditions. The red line represents the daily temperature variation. And then they hit a region of growth where it is more or less linear all the way of time. And they achieve about 2 and 1 half grams per liter in that period of time. If we kept adding nutrients and let it go, this would continue to go out. We haven't yet identified what the upper limit in the sapphire bag system might be. But 2 to 3 grams per liter is our target. So we were happy that we achieved it. This is the first experiment that we did, actually. And our yields were about 16 and 1 half grams per meter squared per day. Our target for our DOE grant is about 20. So we're close, even with the wild type. So we were really delighted with these results. This is a result from the Nash-Silver Unhub who is in the audience in the back of the room here. This is his first paper on measurement of the rate of removal of nitrogen and phosphate from a wastewater system. And in showing that in systems that are very similar to one that I just showed from the last data, we get removal of both phosphate and anionic nitrogen within several days, achieving discharge limits. And so this is our proof of principle data on the nitrogen and phosphate removal rates for Goldy area. We're working now on the biological oxygen demand. That's the removal of the carbon sources and that work is ongoing. And I'll invite you back to see that. OK, last data slide. We'll work with Professor Adrian Ock in the Plant Environmental Science to look at survival of bacteria that might be deleterious that are in our wastewater treatment system now. And so what they did is they isolated an E. coli strain 15v6 that was highly resistant to multiple antibiotics. And there's good data in the literature that resistance to multiple antibiotics correlates with survival. And basically what we did is we looked at two different temperatures, 40 and 48 degrees and four different pH values. And the bottom line is that the lower pH is particularly 1 and 2, survival at either temperature was measured in minutes. If we go to a little bit higher pH, but higher temperature, then they can last for a day. The bottom line is that the conditions under which we're growing Goldy area are not conducive to the growth of human bacterial pathogens. And in point of fact, we did an eight-day selection under those Goldy area growth conditions with primary untreated sewage water would have had all kinds of viruses and bacteria in it. At the end of eight days, we plated that material on very rich bacterial auger. We had a single survivor. It was a bacillus, like an informal strain. There were no other bacteria that were viable at the end of that selection. And one of Dr. Condon's students is studying the physiology and biochemistry of that bacillus strain in case we should need it to speed up the removal of biological oxygen demand. We don't think that's going to be necessary, but that could be an important resource. So to summarize, the last part of the talk, the Goldy area growth as well, with little risk of culture failure and observed any so far, most microorganisms die into the same conditions. So that's good. We think this is going to be a stable, robust system. And it's inexpensive. We're going to get more biomass since we're going to get more energy from the photosynthetic wastewater treatment process. And we hope that this will translate to underserved global communities in tropical and semi-tropical areas. So last slide just to acknowledge is, again, my collaborators and funding sources, thank you for your attention and patience. I'm happy to take questions.


Dwy'n golygu, amser i ysgrifnegadau. Diolch i fynd o'r problema o'r partygol addysg gennym yn y llaw yma. Ie ddweud ddweud, mae'n ddweud ddweud eich rhai oherwydd na ddweud, rydych chi'n gofynu eich bod ddweud oherwydd a'r hollwch ar gyfer cyflawni, ddweud yw'r hollwch yn amlwg i'n gwybod i'ch gweithio, oherwydd eich cyfrifwyr o hynny yn unigol yn gweithio eu mechani a'r gyfrifiadau yn ei wneud o'i cael ei wneud o'r hollwch i'r hollwch ar gweithio'i cyfrifiadau. Ond y gyrfaethau sy'n rhaid i'r cyfle cyfwyr sy'n gyfrannu cymryd yma. mae'r cyfeirio rydw i cynnwys gyda'r cyfle, ac rhaiwn i wneud mewn i'r cyfan, oherwydd y cyfle yw'r lluniau a'r lluniau a'r lluniau mae'r cyfrannu ym mhag sydd yn gydigio'r cyflym yn ei mod. Fel y rhaid i'r cyfle o'r cyflog ymdano i'r cyflog ymif targeddau cyflog yn eu cyfrannu. The energies in that square well are proportional to the square. They go like n squared of some integer, whereas the energies in the harmonic oscillator potential well go like n. That's to say when we took this simple case of the infinitely deep potential, the energy levels go like n squared, not like n. So that gives you a very different behaviour from the simple harmonic oscillator, and I think it's interesting to investigate that to try and recover classical results and see how that dependence on the energy levels on n squared rather than on n manifests itself in the bottom line. We won't take time to do that. The lecture course is short. We're going to move on to this problem, which is more fun. It will allow us to understand how an ammonia maser works, which is a timekeeping device and was the first amazing lasing device. First of all, we're going to solve an abstract problem and then I'll explain why this is relevant for ammonia. We imagine we've got two potential wells, which are divided by some barrier. Ideally, these potential wells would only be a finite depth, so the walls here would cruise off like this with v0, but the computations are made much easier if we let these walls go off to infinity. So the potential goes off to infinity if you go to left of minus x is minus b or right of x is plus b. The potential is zero here. The potential is v0, some number there. So these are basically two of these square wells put adjacent to each other with a finite barrier between the two. Nothing essentially has changed as the computations are made a bit easier by making these go off to infinity left and right. So what are we going to do? We want to find again the stationary states, the states of well-defined energy for this system because they will have an interesting property, which will lead to the ammonia maser. So again, here is the origin, x is zero, this potential well is symmetrical on reflection around the origin. So it's an even function, the potential is an even function of x. That guarantees that the parity operator commutes with the potential energy operator, which guarantees that we can look for states of well-defined parity. So the stationary states can be eigenfunctions of p, so they have well-defined parity. The usual argument that commuting operators mean we can find a complete set of mutual eigenstates. And we're going to assume, so there will be states which have even parity, there will be states that have odd parity, and as yesterday the equation we have to solve is minus h bar squared over 2m d2u by dx squared plus v of x u is equal to e u. So we have to solve this equation and we're looking for even functions and we're looking for odd solutions. We are going to assume that we're going to look for states which are low enough in energy so that they are, as it were, bound by either this well or by this well, as I say, they're classically forbidden in this region. So we're going to look for states which have less energy with e being less than this barrier height, so that classically the particle will be stuck in one well or stuck in the other well and couldn't go between the two, so we'll see quantum mechanically it will go between the two. So that being so, the solutions, so what does that mean? That means that we've got d2u by dx squared, well, d2u by dx squared is going to be 2m over h bar squared v0 minus e times u and this quantity is going to be positive when we're in the middle between x is, when mod x is less than a, so this quantity here is going to be greater than zero and that means that in this middle zone, the solutions to this equation are going to be things like e to the plus big kx, so this means for mod x less than a, we're going to have u goes like e to the plus or minus big kx, this is what we wrote down yesterday, where big k is the square root of 2m v0 minus e over h bar squared, okay? Or, because we're looking for solutions of well-defined parity and these objects don't have well-defined parity, we can take linear combinations of those and we can say, or looking for well-defined parity, we can say u goes like cos kx or shine big kx. These are the solutions of well-defined parity to that very boring differential equation given that this quantity here is positive. So those are the solutions, we know that our solutions will have that form in that middle section, as drawn up there, this is x equals a, this is x equals minus a. And then in the allowed regions, b will be somewhere over here, in the allowed regions either side of the central barrier, we know that we will have sinusoidal behaviour, there we'll be trying to solve the equation. So this is for mod x less than a.  So we're going to have solutions like sin kx plus some phase constant where k is going to be the square root of 2me on h bar squared. So if I put in a phase, an unknown phase, this is an unknown phase here, then this sinusoid will represent any linear combination of sine and cosine and so will be a general solution to this. Oops, sorry, that's correct. I want e to be negative, right? Sorry, no, no, no, no, e is positive, e is positive, e is positive. Yes, there's a minus sign here coming from the minus h bar squared over 2m, so that's why there's a minus sign here and that's why we have this sinusoidal behaviour. Right. So we know what the solutions look like in the middle, we know what the solutions look like on the sides and all we have to do now to fix everything up is make sure the boundary conditions are satisfied where they join. So we have to, so we say that at x equals a, we have to make sure as yesterday that our wave function is continuous and has a continuous derivative. So continuity of the wave function, let's specialise on the even parity case. Continuity of the wave function is going to say that cos times ka must equal b, that's my constant that multiplies the sine, times sine ka plus phi, that's the continuity of u and then I have to deal with continuity of the gradient of u as yesterday, so we have that k sin ka is equal to kb cos ka plus phi. So we are not really very interested in b, it's the same sort of setup as yesterday, we're not very interested in the constant b, yesterday we had a similar constant a, we're very interested in the value that k takes and this thing here, big k, as yesterday can be expressed as a function of little k so the name of the game is to get rid of b so we divide this equation by this equation so 1 over 2 leads us to the conclusion that the hyperbolic cough of ka is equal to k over k times the, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, I'm doing which division, sorry I've got that the wrong way up, so that becomes big k over little k, because I am taking this equation and dividing it by this equation so this k was on the bottom as it were and I brought it up to the top of the other side times the tangent of ka plus phi and now we haven't quite yet because there's one thing we haven't fixed which is we need to find out about this phi thing or what do we have to do with the phi? Phi has to be chosen so that the wave function in that right hand zone vanishes at x equals b remember when we had the infinitely steep sides we concluded that the wave function vanished adjacent to the rise to infinite potential energy that was the point we finished on yesterday so what we can say is that at x equals b we require, because the potential is about to go infinite that u equals 0 so that means that sin kb plus phi is 0 and kb bus fly is so what does that imply? it implies that kb plus phi is some integer number of pi's so that tells us what phi is that tells us that phi obviously is our pi minus b so we put this information into here and we have our equation but while we're doing it it's probably a good idea to express big k in terms of little k so we have expressions for big k and little k on the board and let's work out exactly what we have actually so big k is the square root of 2m v0 minus e on h bar squared which we write as 2m v0 a squared over a squared h bar squared minus 2m e over h bar squared is in fact little k squared and yesterday we identified this object as a dimensionless constant w so this thing is the square root of w over a squared minus k squared so when I take this equation here and that result there in the right hand side and this result here to get rid of those big k's we discover that the hyperbolic cotangent of I want big k a which is going to be the square root of w minus k a squared is equal to on the right hand side big k over little k which is going to be the square root of k sorry, square root of what am I talking about of big w over k a squared minus 1 times the tangent of r pi minus k b minus a now we have what this is so w is the dimensionless constant that characterises the potential wells on each side as yesterday k is the thing of interest to us because it controls the energy it determines the energy of the stationary state and is the only unknown in this equation everything else is known so what we have here is a pretty ghastly equation whose roots determine the values of k which in turn determine the energy and as yesterday the way to solve this is graphically to plot the left hand side of the equation and the right hand side of the equation and separate curves and see where they intersect and I live in hope that my computer has this here so, the computer may have it here but it didn't come up the system has perhaps gone to sleep is anything showing? yeah oh but meanwhile my computer has gone and buried it's here we go right so that should show it's very faint from here it's warming up right but that should show the two sides of the equation the right hand side of the equation sorry no concern that this is not sorry that was that problem we need to go further down it's not the right solution so here is the double potential well and each of these curves is the right hand side of the equation it's coming down like this and there's a different one because we have this tangent so the right hand side of the equation contains a tangent which goes to zero we can forget about the r pi as a matter of fact because the tangent of r pi plus an angle is the same as the tangent of the angle so if I could write this I probably should write this there's w over ka squared minus one times the tangent of this angle here k b minus a and there's a minus sign out front here which is that minus sign so you can add an r pi to a tangent and you don't affect its value so this tangent keeps having zeros as k increases this tangent hits pi 2 pi 3 pi etc the argument of this tangent hits pi 2 pi 3 pi etc and the tangent vanishes and those give you the points where these vertical lines crash down through the origin these points these points that's why there are many branches the other thing that's happening here so the dotted line there is sorry there are two focus for the moment only on the top curve because these things so there are two curves where is this I think this thing is needs a new battery there are two curves running horizontally almost horizontally a dotted one and a dashed one the dotted one is the one we should look at the one that curves upwards at the end that is a plot of this cough alright so when if w is fairly large and ka is fairly small then we're looking at the cough of a large number and that's always one so this thing runs along at one and then eventually when ka becomes on the order of w we're looking at the cough of something smaller than a large number and that becomes that then goes up towards infinity that then goes up towards so that's what's happening there and the magic values of k are given by the intersection of the dotted line and the full lines coming down and you can see you get a series of energies there's only a finite number of them because when ka becomes bigger than w when ka becomes bigger than w this square root goes imaginary and we no longer have any solutions to the equation bad things happen here too so there's only a finite number of energy levels if the well has any finite value of w if we would repeat all this so that's what we have we have a finite number of energy levels this is for the even parity case if we were looking for the odd parity solutions so for odd parity what would happen is that only the only thing that would happen is that this would become a shine and that will become a cosh everything else would stay the same so that the only thing that would happen as we followed through this logic would be that this cough would become a fan a hyperbolic tangent so this is even parity you can follow through the algebra afterwards but believe me I think it's very plausible that all that happens is because you're swapping over a cosh and a shine this becomes for odd we get fan of the square root equals minus the square root etc so the vertically crashing down lines remain the relevant lines the right hand side hasn't changed but the left hand side has changed so it starts off as the tangent the hyperbolic tangent of a large number i.e. one and then it becomes the tangent of a smaller number as ka becomes comparable to w so it turns downwards not upwards because so the point now the crucial point that has physical consequence is that when ka is small in other words when and k is a measure of the energy the energy is proportional to k squared because h bar k is the momentum of the particle as it rattles around inside this well so the energy of the low energy solutions are associated with the oh these things come in pairs the energies come in pairs agreed because we have the even and odd parity things intersect at low k almost exactly in the same place on that diagram you can't see the distinction as you get to higher values of k and the particle is only marginally bound has an energy which is comparable to v0 the the two curves for the right and the left sides diverge and you can see you get different values of k so so once the key thing is the solutions come in pairs because we had two potential wells we get two adjacent solutions in fact if we had three potential wells we would get three if we have an infinite number we would have an infinite number and this is in solid state physics this is crucial because in a crystal you have a 10 to the 24 you have some vast number of potential wells one for each atom and you get a vast number of solutions all crowded together but anyway we just have two wells, we have a pair of solutions they come in pairs of similar energy very similar energy similar E so one is even parity and this actually will be the lower energy solution it has the smaller value of k you can check from the diagram up there and one for the odd parity and this is the higher energy so for this system for a particle trap like that in a well a lowest state and just above it which is of even parity so the ground state here we are, we've got a picture here I think the ground state so the top diagram there shows these wave functions we have a sinusoid on the right a sinusoid on the left the ground state is the two upper full curves it's two sinusoids with a depression in the middle where the barrier is and the particles are classically forbidden and then at an energy just a tiny bit higher you have a very similar pair of sinusoids they are in fact subtly different values of k so they're very subtly different but essentially to a very good approximation the odd parity state is the same as the even parity state except reflected around the origin so it becomes negative on this side so we have two states we have so the wave functions are going to be what we'll call them u plus of x which is the even parity case and u minus of x sorry, sorry u e of x and u odd of x which is the odd parity case if we take linear combinations of these two states we get two other states appsi plus which we'll say is 1 over root 2 of x which is u even of x plus u odd of x and an appsi minus of x so if we take, so appsi plus is the sum of those two wave functions up there so it essentially it vanishes on the left and has a non-zero value on the right so this is the state of being on the right and this is the state of being on the left because if you take them away they add up on the left and they subtract on the right if we put a particle if we actually put the particle into the right-hand well we will set our system up in this state appsi plus this state appsi plus is not a stationary state it is not an energy eigenstate it is not an eigenstate of different energy so if we drop it on the right what our initial condition at t equals 0 this is what our wave function looks like what does our wave function look like generally appsi of x and t is going to be 1 over root 2 times u even of x e to the minus i e even of t over h bar the usual boring time evolution of a stationary state plus u odd of x e to the minus i e odd t over h bar which we can write more conveniently as e to the minus i e even t of h bar over root 2 u even of x plus u odd of x e to the minus i e odd minus e even t on h bar the crucial thing is that if we wait long enough if we wait such a time that the argument of this exponential becomes equal to pi we will be looking at e to the i pi which is minus 1 here and our state will have evolved into some phase factor who cares times u even minus u odd which is the state of being on the left so after a time the time required for this to become pi which is t equals pi h bar over e odd minus e even the particles on the left and you can see that this will go on forever you put the particle in on the right it's not a stationary state it moves to the left and then after twice this time it will have come back to the right it's going to oscillate between these two between these two wells forever and ever according to this theory and crucially the time scale is long it takes a long time to get from the right to the left if this energy difference is small and we've seen that this energy difference is small right energy difference being small means that this time scale is long or when is this energy difference small it's small when the barrier between the two wells is high so what we say is that the particle takes a certain time to tunnel through that barrier so we say that the particle whoops tunnels through the barrier in a time which grows it grows very rapidly as a fact with v0 with w with the height of the barrier so a high barrier or a wide barrier means it takes a long time to get through but according to this analysis it will eventually get through ok so that's just a toy problem now let's see what the hell that's got to do with the real world by talking about ammonia somewhere here we have a picture of ammonia so ammonia is a we don't have a picture of ammonia sorry I've somehow lifted up ok so what does ammonia consist of it consists of three hydrogen atoms so these are H's and it consists of a nitrogen atom and the three hydrogens form some kind of a triangle roughly speaking and the nitrogen atom sits well this is the classical picture we'll see quantum mechanical picture isn't like this but this is the classical picture we think of the hydrogen atom as sitting either above the triangle formed by the hydrogen atoms or below the triangle formed by the hydrogen atoms now this is a complicated system it's got four nuclei and ten electrons so it's a really complicated dynamical problem but next term in the next course I'll see a thing called the adiabatic approximation which is what chemists use in order to understand the dynamics of complicated systems like this it allows you to treat all these bonds between the nuclei which are provided by the electrons as springs so what we can do what chemists routinely do do is they calculate the energy of this molecule in what's called a clamped nuclear nuclei approximation so they put they say let the nuclei be let them be here and let's calculate the energy and you can do that for the nitrogen atom for the nitrogen nucleus being at every point along a line that passes through the centroid of the triangle so imagine doing that that leads to a potential energy curve if you like for the nitrogen nucleus which is going to be something it turns out to be something like this so there are two wells the lowest potential energy when it's an appropriate distance either above the plane or below the plane there are two wells and a barrier in the middle because it isn't comfortable being in the middle of the triangle formed by the hydrogens so we have this potential energy curve and now we know what the energy levels of this molecule are going to look like because we know that there are going to be even parities the stationary states are going to divide it's obvious on geometrical grounds this is symmetrical that this well looks just like this well because there's no fundamental difference above the triangle and below the triangle so we know the solutions are going to come in pairs there's going to be a of even parity solutions and odd parity solutions just like in our square well so we also know that if we start if we start with a nitrogen in this well so we start with a nitrogen above the triangle it's going on some characteristic time to move over here and then it's going to move back there and it's going to oscillate between the above the triangle and below the triangle so if we start it in either above the triangle or below the triangle it's going to oscillate between the two those who have done chemistry will know also that this nitrogen is going to be carrying a negative charge and these hydrogens some amount of positive charge so what are we going to have we're going to have an oscillating dipole this molecule is going to have a dipole moment because of the electronegativity of the nitrogen and it's going to be an oscillating dipole if we start it in this in this state of being above the triangle it's going to oscillate to and fro and what does an oscillating dipole electric dipole do? it radiates so this thing is going to radiate and you will be able to if you know what this potential surface looks like you'll be able to calculate the frequency which is going to radiate because the frequency which is going to radiate is going to be given basically by this formula here for the half period to go from there to there so twice this time it's going to be the period of a complete oscillation and that's going to be the the period of the radiation ok so so the molecule if started it's a dipole so started on top if you can achieve that it's going to be an oscillating dipole and the experiments lead to the conclusion that the frequency new is about 150 MHz you can measure it so it's a source of microwave radiation from this 150 MHz you can also work out what the change in the energy what this energy difference is so EOD minus EE turns out to be about 10 to the minus 4 electron volts so that's an energy difference which is small compared to the thermal energies of molecules just here in the room the thermal energies of molecules so K the Boltzmann constant times T the room temperature is something like 0.03 electron volts so this is much bigger than E0 minus EE what does that mean from your statistical mechanics course you either know now or will soon know that that means that we expect at room temperature there are essentially equal numbers of molecules in the even and the odd states because the energy required to go from the ground state this is the ground state or the energy of the ground state to the first excited state is less than the characteristic thermal energy knocking around in the room so there will be large numbers of molecules in both these even and odd states and the idea behind anamonia masa is that we is to find a way of separating the molecules which are in the excited state the odd state leading them into some kind of a resonant cavity where they will then because they're in the excited state they will be they will decay into the ground state if you leave them if they're left alone they will decay into the ground state emitting a photon with the balance of the energy so they will radiate away at 150 MHz so that's that's the strategy behind a masa so in a masa to get a masa you have to isolate the half the roughly a half of the molecules in the first excited state and the way you do this is you exploit the fact that well let's just imagine putting these molecules into an electric field so we're going to put the molecules and the strength of this electric field I'm going to denote with curly E to distinguish it so that electric field is distinguished from energy ordinary E roman E so we put these molecules into an electric field E and ask ourselves how does that change since these are dipolar molecules these molecules are electric dipoles we're expecting that that changes the energy of the molecules putting them in a field and maybe we can get them separated by exploiting this fact so you put them in an electric field and ask so how does that change we're doing quantum mechanics changing energy means changing Hamiltonian so we have to ask ourselves now how does this change the Hamiltonian of these molecules what term in the Hamiltonian is introduced by this electric field and the way to do that is to think in terms of the Hamiltonian write the Hamiltonian in the basis so we're going to let plus be so it's going to be mathematically 1 over root 2 of the even parity plus the ground state plus the odd parity using a different notation even parity plus odd parity so this is the ground state this is the first excited state this linear combination we're going to call it plus and it'll be the state in which the molecule is definitely above the triangle and similarly minus is going to be 1 over root 2 even parity state is going to be below so this is below triangle this is above this is exactly what we did over here with our psi plus and psi minus we're working there with wave functions here we're working with the underlying kets the thing is the dipole moment if the dipole moment of these two states have opposite signs because this one has the negative charge at positive z and this one has the negative charge at negative z so they have opposite dipole moments and let p now be p be the dipole operator it was the parity operator earlier on but now let it be the dipole operator then these states are going to be eigen states of this dipole operator they have well defined dipoles p plus is in fact going to be minus qs times plus well what am I saying I'm saying this is some charge this is some distance the product of a charge in a distance gives me units of dipole electric dipole moment I've got a minus sign here because because this state I said has a negative charge above at positive z so the dipole moment points in the opposite direction to the location of the nitrogen atom and therefore this one has a negative dipole moment and this eigen value is the dipole moment this is the eigen value of this operator because this thing is a state of well defined dipole moment and this is where the dipole moment appears and basically this is just some number which has the dimensions of a charge times a distance which the charge is going to be on the order some fraction of an electron charge and this distance is going to be this characteristic size of the atom a tenth of a nanometre similarly p minus is going to be plus qs minus so this encapsulates the crucial point that these two states have opposite these signed dipole moments what is the energy of a dipole in an e field well the answer is that the energy is minus this is just classical physics is minus the field times the dipole moment so now we know how much the energy of this state and this state have changed by the electric field it's it's given by this here where we put in those kind of eigen values so now what we want to do is write down the matrix that represents the Hamiltonian in this plus minus basis so we want to write the Hamiltonian as plus h plus matrix this is a complex number right plus h minus minus h plus so these four complex numbers we want to write down that matrix Hamiltonian consists of the Hamiltonian of the undisturbed of the undisturbed nitrogen molecule plus the contribution here this is plus the contribution here from the electric field what do we have for the undisturbed let's calculate this separately so I need to calculate what what plus h plus is for the isolated atom well that is going to be one over two even whoops because these are linear combinations of the eigen states even and odd even plus odd h even plus odd right because is this is this but h on this is an eigen function of this operator if this is the isolated operator so we get h on even produces e even times even even is orthogonal to odd but meets up with this so we get an even and h on odd produces e odd times odd which is orthogonal to this but meets up with this to produce an e odd so at the end of the day we get a half of the even plus e odd which is the average energy let's call it e bar similarly we have that let's have a look now at plus h minus the off diagonal element that is going to be one over two even plus odd h even minus odd so things are rather similar except we now get from here here and here e even and from here here and here we get minus e odd so we get a half of e even minus e odd which I think I have been calling we're going to call this minus a so a is so we're going to call this the definition of a and we're going to put this minus sign in here because we know that odd the odd energy is bigger than the even energy so this quantity here is a negative number and putting that minus sign I get this positive number so this matrix up here what's it looking like it's looking like e bar from here sorry a this is a Hermitian matrix so what appears down here has to be the complex conjugate of that real number a in other words a and we will find that this one is also e bar that's for the isolated atom then we have to add on to it the contribution for the from this which but this thing is an eigenfunction of p so the only contributions down the diagonal there are no off diagonal contributions from this additional piece to the operator to the Hamiltonian and what I have is plus what I need is the dipole operator so I have p on plus which produces minus qs times plus so this minus sign and the minus sign that I've just spoken cancel and we get plus q and here we get minus q curly e s so this is what the Hamiltonian looks like in this in this basis I'm running out of time so let me just sketch how the thing goes so what we have got is an explicit expression for the Hamiltonian in the presence of an electric field what we would like to know is what the energy levels are that result from this and how those energy levels vary as a function of the electric field but that's a dead cinch what you've got up there is a 2x2 matrix anybody can find the eigenvalues of that 2x2 matrix and those will be the energies that the molecule has when you stuff it in this electric field so we find the eigenvalues of this matrix and we plot how they depend on curly e so what they actually are is the average energy plus or minus the square root I believe of a2 minus q just make sure I didn't make a mistake that I wouldn't bring yeah so these are the possible energies and if we plot this graphically what do we see here we have the strength of the electric field we find that we have solutions that behave like this here we have ebar plus a here we have ebar minus a and here we have the strength of the electric field this is just a graph of those two things you can easily check that that's the case here of course is ebar so this is the ground state if you switch off the electric field we have two states here and here separated by this small amount which is 2a as you switch on the electric field the energy of the ground state goes down but the energy of the first excited state goes up there's a lot of interest in the way in which this energy behaves here it's behaving quadratically as a function this is a sort of parabola as a function of e and eventually it becomes a straight line as a function of e on both top and bottom and what that's telling you is that in this regime here the even state the ground state which is the even state has no dipole moment intrinsically because the particle is equally likely to be above the nitrogen is equally likely to be above or below the plane so in the ground state there's no dipole moment you switch on the electric field and you make a bias so that the upper field say the upper position gets to have a lower energy in the lower position because the electric field is pushing it that way because the nitrogen starts to spend a bit more time above than below and now the molecule requires a dipole moment because it's not spending the nitrogen is not spending equal time above and below so it requires a dipole moment the magnitude of this dipole moment is proportional to the energy and therefore the energy that you get the change in the energy which is equal as it says up there e is minus electric field times the dipole moment becomes proportional to dipole moment squared so that's why we have a quadratic dependence like this once you're in this regime you have a fairly strong electric field you've made such a strong bias you've made being up so energetically more favourable than being down that the nitrogen spending all its time up the dipole moment is now independent of the strength of the electric field because it's increasingly electric field doesn't cause it to spend any more time up than it or it's already spending all its time up so that the energy becomes proportional to this how do you make your maser work you make your maser work well the fact that the energy of one of these goes down the other one goes up means that as the field increases that if you have an inhomogeneous field if you pass your beam through a region in which the electric field is varying in strength so I have some sort of capacitor plates I have a pointy thing a needle and a cup then the electric field goes like this and we have a high field up here and a low field down there so I have a region of inhomogeneous field the ones in this state are going to be bent sorry they're going to be bent upwards it lowers their energy so they move into the region of high field these ones move into the region of low field so this is the ground and this is the excited and then you can put these ones into your resonant cavity and hear it sing so there's an example of how with a with a very simple minded model you can explore so quite interesting physics physics which is very inherently quantum mechanical this energy level is coming in pairs because we have even an odd parity states this ability of a molecule which you would think was inherently dipolar in the ground state have no dipole moment because the nitrogen can be simultaneously above and below all of these features are very quantum mechanical and with a simple minded model we're able to explore them


re's nobody who has actually, he had so much heart. You know, even though he's kind of like salty, you know, sea dog kind of personality, he had so much heart underneath that. And actually one of the best, one of my best friends, his name's Ed LeBreck and he's not on social media or anything like that. But he's a very good friend to me and I respect him a great deal. Maybe he'll listen and hear this, but he gave me probably the best compliment I've ever gotten. And he said, because he's known a lot of guys in Navy SEALs and like a lot of really good men. And he said, dude, when I was going through like the worst part of my life, he said, I gotta tell you this, man. He's like, I've known a lot of really good men. He said, you've got more heart than anybody I've ever met. And he said, you just, you care a lot about people.   But you know what? I'm always gonna, I'm gonna try and do it my way. Cause when I'm 80 years old, I'm hopefully 80 years old and dying.  I did it my way. Do you know what trait that you've picked up from your parents that you don't so much like about yourself? Probably if I had a chance to think about that. Well, I know I'm more like my mother than my father. And I think that your best traits and your worst traits are almost always right up against each other, right?  So like- Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. Yeah, so like, I'm a really hard working person and very passionate. And sometimes that probably gets the better of me. You know what I mean? I probably jump a little bit too quick, you know, to defend something and I'll even do it on Twitter. Like I've apologized to some people because like, oh, I'm actually misread what you said. I'm sorry that that was wrong. But yeah, like I said, the- I would think that happens quite a bit because that happened to me a few times when I first started getting on Instagram and I was responding to people after I do kind of like controversial posts and realized that some people were just like, you just, you can't tell. There's no sarcasm doesn't come out well and you're joking. Yeah, and then I like rip them.  Yeah, somebody was like kind of like, Holly thought somebody was crushing me about my personal life, about what had happened. And she was like, timing up this response to just rip this person a new one, you know? And I looked at the post and I'm like, no, babe, they're actually being supportive. Don't say that, you know, like, yeah. You know, my parents, yeah, I would say my mom, my mom, I love my mom and she's a wonderful person but she would be a difficult person to live with. There's a reason I moved away when I was 18 years old but I love my mother very much. That is not me saying I don't like my mom or I don't love my mom. I love my mom. It's good you made that clear. She's a big mind pump listener. She probably will listen to it. She probably will. But she's a very, very strong personality, you know? And I'm kind of the same way. So, you know, but I really like- Yeah, but you wouldn't want to get rid of that trait. You know, that's an important- That's an important trait.  She's like, she cares. She's like, and she even comments on my family. She's like, I love your family. She's like, I've never met people who care more than your family, you know?  I'm probably a little bit like that, a little bit the same way, you know? I think relationships are the best place to find these things, you know? Like, I didn't realize- It's amazing the differences between people. Oh, yeah. I mean, I have a relationship with Katrina that's, we're so polar opposite the way we were raised with our families. Like, every decision that they make, they gather together and they decide as a family and they all live close together. And like, I was the complete opposite. Yeah, people like that. Oh, yeah.  And I just don't, I wasn't raised doing that. And it's almost, it's borderline uncomfortable for me. Yeah. Even though we've been together for a really long time. And I don't like to be anti-social or be like a bah humbug about things, but it's just how I was raised. So, that's a trait that I think of that I have because of the way I was raised that I wish I could get rid of because I wish that I could enjoy being. And over years, I think I've kind of trained myself to try and let loose and enjoy it more, but- You more of an introvert? I'm not. That's funny. That's what's really weird is that I'm extroverted, but when it comes to family stuff, maybe I am because I, we didn't, I wasn't around my cousins and aunts and uncles and my, you know, my family kept us really tight and just our family. And we didn't let a lot of people in and my parents didn't really socialize a lot with friends. And so, getting older and then getting in a relationship where someone is that, their family is everything. Yeah. It's a tough transition for sure. Speaking of the devil, she's actually outside the building right now. Perfect timing. Good time to end. Well, amen. Always a great time having you on. Yep.  I love it.   You can have different opinions about things, but good people are good people, you know what I mean? And you guys, all of you like reached out to me when you knew things were kind of going bad in my life and asked if there was anything you could do. I know Sal called me, you know, like, that's how I judge people. Not on whether you like carbs or fats or whatever, you know what I mean? That's what I, good people are good people, you know what I mean? And that's what makes a difference. And I can just tell you guys, anybody listening, these guys have always treated me way better than they had to. And I consider it a big time privilege every time they have me on the show and I love doing it. Oh, I appreciate it. Thanks very much, man. Thanks, man. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes Maps Anabolic, Maps Performance, and Maps Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. 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