Electromagnetics for the win

Now that the UW school year has commenced a spate of lectures on different topics has been posted I have the chance to take the light rail and sample the frontier of knowledge in-person at the Universit of Washington here in Seattle. For example, Smith Hall hosted an interesting talk on the Applied Math series by former Los Alamos, now Helion https://www.helionenergy.com/ scientist.

https://amath.washington.edu/calendar?trumbaEmbed=eventid%3D210915370%26seotitle%3DSeminar-in-Applied-Mathematics-Luis-Chacon-Distinguished-Theoretical-Scientist-Helion%26view%3Devent%26-childview%3D%26returnUrl%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Famath.washington.edu%252F

on the topic of modeling plasmas. This took me back to my days as a research assistant where I developed simulations for high-power electron devices (I confess I had to remind myself of the details of that Cornell work from https://sites.google.com/site/vincentzimmer/cv). I also prototyped and modeled a device to be used as input in ferroelectrics emission research at the high energy lab.

I was amazed to hear that a lot of the basic simulation techniques like Particle in Cell (PIC) from tools I used at Cornell like Superfish https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10140823 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/10140823 are still in use today. The talk mentioned how to reduce dimensionality, etc, for supercomputer runs but the basic algorithmics held. Fascinating. It appears SuperFish isn't open source but a quick web search did reveal https://github.com/OpenParEM/OpenParEM. Perhaps I'll dive back into this area if I can spare a few free hours - my Jackson 'Classical Electrodynamics' book looks lonely on my bookshelf.

It is quite satisfying to see invariants like Maxwell's equations hold.  And happily, not a single mention of AI in the talk. I did hear a funny quote, though, from another senior engineer during a dinner hosted by some executive recruiters at from local tech company when I asked him for his hot takes on AI. He told me that when presented with what he believes is AI generated content, such as a specification, he updated his former reply of 'TL;DR' now with 'AI;DR.'  Nice. 

As always, history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme. During my time at the Cornell high-energy lab I recall work on traveling wave tubes, ion beams, etc and the mention of applicability SDI / 'Star Wars' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative as a use-case; I don't recall if they had funding for that work or not as I was a lowly undergrad tinkering away in the lab.  And the rhyming continues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system. 

So back to UW talk by the Helion scientist.  Ironically here's an email I received 30 minutes before the lecture

So from high-end steak dinner with one tech monster company to a startup solicitation in the space of a day, quite the interesting job scene.

On the theme of job markets (and I promise I'll tie this back to the initial them of electromagnetics), they definitely seem to go in cycles, too. Since I graduated a semester early from my undergrad I missed a lot of the on-campus interviewing and ended up returning to Texas without an offer in hand in January 1992. Given that environment I considered going back to grad school at the time and debated building upon my Bachelor's in electrical engineers by diving deeper into statistical signal processing at Texas A&M in College Station, TX or electromagnetics at Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX. 

I still remember visiting Tech campus and talking to my prospective advisor. He was a tall man of Norwegian descent who had fully acculturated to Texas. I recall how he referred to Lubbock as "the land of 2π steradians" as a clever, nerdy way to describe Lubbock's exceptionally flat landscape.

I didn't do the campus visit for A&M, though. Luckily Tom Parks, of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks%E2%80%93McClellan_filter_design_algorithm fame, was my Cornell advisor so I was accepted without much concern.

Why electromagnetics? 

I think I caught the bug for the topic while doing my internship at Texaco in the summer of 1991. During that time I was asked to do some measurements on the efficacy of a capacitive sensor for different oil/water mixtures. I think they called them 'water cut' sensors which had commercial value since when oil flows through your pipeline it's important to know how much is crude versus water. Doing the experiments was fun but as always I got the itch to understand the device from first principles. Since it was a first party sensor, what are the options to change the electrode geometry, what are the expected results, etc. As such, I broke out my Turbo Pascal and wrote 1800 lines of a device simulation. I wasn't aware of the latest techniques in writing de novo simulations since I'd used canned tools like Superfish mentioned earlier, so I visited University of Houston and read different books and articles. 

https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/device-simulation-august-1991.pdf

Now that I was onto the problem statement of using physical phenomena for building sensors, during this same 1991 internship at Texaco I proposed and prototyped a fiber-optic technique for measuring properties of fluids. I always enjoyed the software side more than the hardware, though, and I still recall the analog engineer at Texaco looking at my breadboarded op amp circuitry which helped drive my experiments and asking 'where is the hardware'?

As part of my house-cleaning of late, you'll see old items I've mentioned like NSA job letter, Cornell engineer magazine, etc. in earlier blog postings. The above report and below post-internship correspondence also appeared as I loaded bags for the Sammamish shredding event. After the internship, Texaco prepared a patent application naming me as the primary inventor, although I have not located a corresponding published application or issued patent.

I did find part of that post-internship patent application draft

and corresponding office action.

And it looks like attorney is still around, too

https://referlex.com/attorney/50fd243c-6ae1-45c4-ade0-4a7f654e6dfd although Texaco was acquired by Chevron quite some time ago. 

And there's my "Vince" tell in the "Dear Vince" above office action correspondence. I always say that when someone calls me 'Vince' they really don't know me. I'm entirely too high strung to go by such a happy-go-lucky name as 'Vince.' Even as a child my mother told me I'd correct adults who called my 'Vince' by saying 'No, my name is Vincent.' 

And little did I know in 1992 that I would see a raft of office actions across 100's of patents 1997+. You have to have quite a thick skin to wade through those objections without taking it personally. I learned a trick at Intel, though. When lawyers would ask me to help address an office action I'd reply "I'd love to but doesn't my employment contract preclude me from reading other company patents for fear of treble damages in case discovery proves I knew about them" or somesuch armchair lawyering I found myself embarrassingly doing back in the day.

OK. A third Saturday in a row of blogging?  What gives? Maybe some nostalgia from the earlier 90's spurred by finding old papers during the house clean-up? A pause in the storm of project work? Who knows other than time to get back to work.