The change in electronic distributions in molecules as they are photoexcited can offer useful insights for photochemistry. Studying the position and momentum of molecular fragments after ionization by "tunnelling" in an intense laser field can provide a means of mapping these electron distributions, but excited state molecules can be awkward to probe in this way. Now a collaboration of researchers at Nagoya University, The Open University of Japan, the University of Electro-communications, Tokyo (UEC, Tokyo), and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, has successfully applied the approach to excited states of nitrogen oxide (NO).

On 1 April 2016 Laura Zahn, Senior Editor of the journal Science gave a lecture at UEC Tokyo, entitled 'Scientific publishing from the inside out'. The audience included members of the board of directors of UEC Tokyo and President Takashi Fukuda.

The March 2016 issue of the UEC e-Bulletin focuses on the achievements of young faculty members on the UEC tenure track program. The contents include an overview of the 2015 Tenure Track Research Reports Meeting held on 22 March 2016 and research highlights of publications by tenure track faculty members. The highlights introduce research on task allocation and computing the logistics of snow-plowing; graph-based data mining reveals patterns in learning space use; metal mesh filters for calculating pressure drop; and environmentally friendly refrigerants.

A novel fluorescent probe library is developed by a research team including scientists from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo. The findings are published in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

Scientists from the Northwest Normal University (NWNU), Gansu, China, visited Nobuyuki Nakamura, associate professor at the Institute of Laser Science, University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo (UEC, Tokyo) as part of a bilateral joint research program supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and Ministry of Education People's Republic of China (MOE).

Caltech scientist Cody Geary delivers lecture on RNA origami to UEC students and faculty

A potential for earthquake prediction may lie in detecting anomalies in the propagation of very low frequency (VLF: 3-30 kHz) radio signals, as they are greatly affected by ionospheric disturbances that may originate from seismic activity. However there are several other possible causes for VLF anomalies, including terrestrial and space weather, many of which are little understood. In their latest work the UEC researchers help to shed light on how to distinguish VLF anomalies caused by geomagnetic storms that have no relation to seismic activity.

Increasing data use is placing greater demands on the radio antenna units that transmit data to mobile devices. Supplying power to these antenna units by the same optical fibre systems that transmit data signals to them could improve and simplify these infrastructures if the power supplied this way can be increased. Now Motoharu Matsuura, Hidehito Furugori and Jun Sato at the University of Electro-Communications have demonstrated the ability to supply 60 W over a 300 m test fibre system, exceeding the power supplied in previous work and emphasising the potential of the approach.

The December 2015 of the UEC e-Bulletin is a special issue dedicated to highlighting the excellence in research of eight young members of faculty on the UEC Tenure Track Program, where the 'Topics' section showcases their unique and challenging research.
The contents of December 2015 UEC e-Bulletin are Research Highlights on the limitations of wireless transceivers; brain research on walking control and the influence of lower limb co-ordination; snake robot range-sensing control system that avoids tail-end collisions; and random additions to efficiently anonymize large data sets. Tenure track based Topics articles on geophysics insights into the origins of sodium and other metallic layers in the Earth's upper atmosphere; neuroscience research on creating realistic computational models of the cerebellum; astrophysics of the birth of high mass stars and the origin of life; and cotranscriptional folding and computational modelling of self-assembly of RNA origami for universal computation. News summary of the Irago Conference 2015 held at Cape Irago, Aichi Prefecture in October 2015.

Ultrafast and high efficiency manipulation of the quantum states of helium with high power lasers enables the realization of femtosecond two photon Rabi oscillations. The research was reported online in Nature Photonics on 30 November 2015 and has potential applications for room temperature quantum computing.