It’s October 9, 10/9, and today, just like last year, scientists at MIT and elsewhere are celebrating “10 -9 , or in the parlance of the nanoscale, one-billionth, or one times ten to the power of negative nine. One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, for example. That’s where the nomenclature comes from.

In any case, part of the dramatic appeal of today’s announcements comes in exploring some of the biggest advances in nanotech that MIT people have been working on. In the announcement of this year’s 10-9, there are two, which are showcased in videos publicly available on YouTube.

These breakthrough announcements are called ‘Curiosity on a Mission … at the nanoscale’ after a prior series of shorts called ‘Curiosity on a Mission’ developed at MIT, primarily by MIT’s Office of the Vice President for Communications, led by Alfred Ironside.

Here, some of the best and brightest engineers in the MIT community talk about specifically what they are doing, this 10-9, to push the envelope on technology.

Paper-Thin Solar Cell Design

I think it’s intuitive to many of us that one of the best applications of nanoscale is to make solar cells simpler, smaller, less costly, and ultimately, much more sustainable. Naysayers, particularly in America, had used the bulky build of solar cells and requisite material sourcing to suggest that solar was a dead-end.

Not anymore. The work on ultra-efficient solar is a game-changer for the world. We can now get serious about using clean, renewable energy as a practical alternative, and this kind of design is behind that.

Check out the video with Karen Yang, PhD student in MIT’s Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as she explains the process of making this dream a reality:

“A solar cell begins when we absorb light in our active layers, such as our perovskite layer,” she says. “That boosts an electron up and separates it from its corresponding hole. And we want to be able to extract that electron outside of our device, and that’s what’s actually creating electricity. We have to control that interface at the nanoscale such that the electrons go in the correct direction that we want them to. So essentially, we’re building the electrons a slide for them to slide down.”

I had heard about perovskite before, in a conference years ago. But now, this practical application is incarnating the concept.

“The silicon solar cells in the market today look very, very similar to what was first deployed in the ‘60s and the ‘70s,” Yang says. “However, advancements at the nanoscale and particularly what we are developing in MIT.nano allow us to shrink those dimensions down so that we are able to coat very lightweight, very thin solar cells to discard all of that excess weight that the traditional silicon cells require.”

Another such project has , arguably, an even more fascinating thrust. Engineer Patrick Strohbeen explains how his team is working on the development of quantum bits or “qubits,” a new type of storage for ultrapowerful quantum computers.

“This is a system that can deposit metals at the rate of roughly a layer of atoms per second, which gives us extremely precise control over interfaces and surfaces and different layer structures that we want to deposit,” Strohbeen says. “The MBE affords us a great platform to study the material science of our qubits, and having it in a clean room like MIT.nano, which is world-class, allows us to then take these material science discoveries and conclusions and apply them to real devices.”

Check out the rest of the video.

And then there’s something very cool-looking (no pun intended) that’s set to be at work at MIT presently.

A quantum dilution refrigerator is a specialized machine that cools quantum computers to temperatures extremely close to absolute zero—often around 10–20 millikelvin, or roughly −273.14°C. That’s a pretty extreme scale, in and of itself. Human life can’t thrive at those temps. But they might enable a new frontier of calculation.

In terms of upcoming events, STUDIO.nano plans to open an exhibit called Amphibian Drift, this Friday, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Professor Markus Buehler, Professor Gediminas Urbonas, and Nomeda Urbonas for MIT Future Fest are behind this project, which they call “an awe-inspiring example of what becomes possible when scientific inquiry and artistic expression cross-pollinate.”

It’s all part of this year’s 10-9, where we acknowledge one specific aspect of all of the excellent work that goes on here at MIT and around the Boston area, with many diverse stakeholders, to which I raise a glass.