{"id":4,"date":"2016-05-20T20:21:06","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T20:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2016\/?p=4"},"modified":"2016-06-03T14:10:42","modified_gmt":"2016-06-03T21:10:42","slug":"abe-takes-bow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2016\/abe-takes-bow\/","title":{"rendered":"Abe Takes a Bow"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Abe played Irish fiddle twice<\/strong> at the Clinton White House. The 1981 Harvey Mudd graduate quips, \u201cThe gigs paid nothing, but the food was great.\u201d<\/p>\n

He loves Irish traditional dance music and has played a lot of it, yet, like all Mudders, he\u2019s also of a fiercely technical turn of mind. He proves that daily as an engineer and now manager of 47 employees in the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), a premier government research-and-development lab in Washington, D.C. There, his widely recognized technical skills recently earned him the title of Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.<\/p>\n

I like the challenge of delving into problems to understand the physics and the actual engineering, and then of taking it beyond where other people have gone.<\/p>\n

\u2014DAVID ABE \u201981, FELLOW, INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of his day job, he says, \u201cI love engineering. I like to see a result. I\u2019m not a science-for-science\u2019s-sake kind of person. I like the challenge of delving into problems to understand the physics and the actual engineering, and then of taking it beyond where other people have gone.\u201d In his 19-year career at the NRL and (with a few stops in between) six earlier years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a Department of Energy lab in Northern California, \u201cI\u2019m never bored at work. I love learning new things every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the fiddle has always played a kind of private tune in his life, influencing his vacation time, his choice of friends and even his eventual life location and job. He never thought he had the talent or inner drive to make it a career, but \u201cit was always more than just a hobby.\u201d When he brought his childhood interest in the instrument to Harvey Mudd, he found that his college participated in the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship program. This program funds graduating seniors to spend a year abroad studying their passion, even if it\u2019s not their intended career. Abe won a year \u201cto study regional styles of traditional Irish fiddle music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abe, who is ethnically Japanese, read his formal acceptance note slightly more buoyantly as, \u201cLet\u2019s send the Asian kid to Ireland and see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the Watson Fellowship was, Abe says, \u201clife changing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted my music to sound authentically Irish,\u201d he says. \u201cThough I knew the tunes, I didn\u2019t think I had the right feel.\u201d In Ireland, he fell in with a talented group of musicians who befriended and mentored him. Over the years, his playing \u201chas opened an incredible number of doors\u201d and was part of the reason he and his wife, Mary Carpenter Abe (another 1981 Harvey Mudd graduate, \u201cI am very lucky to have met her\u201d), and two children, Lynn and\u00a0Tom, stayed east after Abe received his engineering doctorate from the University of Maryland. \u201cIn the Washington, D.C., area,\u201d he says, \u201cin addition to the changing seasons\u2014which my Midwestern-born wife loved, and I, growing up in L.A., had never experienced\u2014there is a vibrant Irish music community I could participate in. And, compared with California, it\u2019s a lot closer to Ireland.\u201d Every few years, he visits friends in Ireland, gaining \u201can intimate perspective\u201d on music and culture in that country. \u201cI would like to think that my experiences derived from my Watson year have helped make me a more effective manager by enabling me to understand and appreciate the viewpoints of others,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

But that was later. Initially, the Watson fellowship only delayed the beginning of his first full-time job as an engineer at LLNL, when the lab agreed to defer Abe\u2019s promising engineering career to accommodate his year abroad. By this time, Abe had already proven himself as a summer intern and as a member of an LLNL-sponsored Engineering Clinic team.<\/p>\n

At LLNL, Abe began the research that, in a variety of forms, would occupy his professional career. The subject was a challenging niche field that most consumers considered pass\u00e9: vacuum tubes.<\/p>\n

That term usually brings to mind the glass-envelope devices used in early digital computers and mid-20th century radios and televisions. These devices have largely been replaced in consumer electronics by smaller and cheaper solid-state transistors. However, for applications that require high frequency and power in a compact package, a tube can be the best technology for the job.<\/p>\n

A beam of electrons generated and propagated in a vacuum forms the basis of the field called vacuum electronics. By manipulating the electromagnetic fields near the electrons, the beam can be switched on and off at very high power and frequency. Also, through interaction with a circuit, electrons can be used to generate or amplify radio waves.<\/p>\n

\"David
\nAbe playing on The Pigeon on the Gate – R\u00edl gan ainm<\/em><\/strong>
\n

Modern tubes are used for applications like heating plasmas of atomic particles for the huge machines attempting to create controlled nuclear fusion; in telecommunications satellites and transmitters for boosting the interplanetary communications that brought us the recent images from Pluto; and in high-power radars. These are the types of devices that Abe has spent most of his career developing.<\/p>\n

At NRL, the push has been to develop radio wave amplifiers that operate at increasingly higher frequencies. For radar, that means increased resolution of smaller objects; for telecommunications, more bandwidth and increased data rates. Higher frequency also offers alternatives to widely used transmission bands oversaturated with information from cell phones and TV signals.<\/p>\n

But higher-frequency operation requires more power to overcome atmospheric resistance to wave propagation. More power\u00a0translates to higher voltages and currents that could overwhelm a transistor, or even a group of them. Among other problems, high-power transistors generate heat. Here is where vacuum electronics technology can shine: \u201cA vacuum tube is the ultimate in keeping heat generation low: There are no collisions as the electrons propagate in literally nothing,\u201d says Abe.<\/p>\n

Abe is leading efforts to build devices that can access the very top of the radio-frequency spectrum, approximately 100 gigahertz to one terahertz (roughly 100 to 1,000 times the frequency of your cell phone). His group has recently produced record power and bandwidths at frequencies just south of a terahertz.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not so easy to do, because these high-frequency devices require a lot of power to be packed into a very small volume. \u201cYou need to build things insanely small and accurately to work at those frequencies,\u201d Abe says. \u201cThe tunnel through which to thread an electron beam in some tube applications is less than the width of a human hair.\u201d<\/p>\n

From Abe\u2019s point of view, that\u2019s just another opportunity. \u201cTraditional methods of metal machining and assembly lack the necessary precision, so it\u2019s necessary to explore new fabrication techniques.\u201d<\/p>\n

This wide range of multidisciplinary work, Abe says, is what he enjoys most. He praises the virtues of his broad-based engineering training\u00a0at Harvey Mudd, where his general engineering degree provided a useful background in chemistry, materials science, electrical and mechanical engineering and manufacturing technologies.<\/p>\n

There are no textbooks incorporating the advances Abe produces in his niche field. His technical papers\u2014he has published nearly 200 and is cited over 1,000 times in the papers of others\u2014 will be the material for the textbooks of the future.<\/p>\n

And just as he has taught classes explaining vacuum electronics to upcoming engineers, he also now teaches fiddle when he visits Ireland, the country to which he first went to improve his musical art. The standing invitation, from an annual summer school for fiddlers in Donegal, \u201cis one of the nicest affirmations of how far I\u2019ve come in developing an authentic Northern sound to my playing.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, from Abe, this seasoned advice: There isn\u2019t necessarily a \u201cbest\u201d path through life. \u201cI could have started at Intel or HP and my life would have been very different\u2014not better, not worse, just different.\u201d But, he adds, \u201cHopefully, you can find something you love doing. Then go with that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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