IEO Researchers win top innovation prize

Dr. Suzanne Martin (manager IEO) , Dr. Izabela Naydenova (Lecturer in Physics), Dennis Bade (PhD student) and Prof. Vincent Toal (Head of Physics and Director IEO) have won the overall best invention prize in DIT Inventor’s Competition 2009 for their single beam holographic optical data storage system.

Element 112 confirmed but not named

Element 112 has finally been recognised by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) almost a decade after its first discovery. But it will only officially be added to the periodic table when the team credited with discovering the element devise a name for it.

To create super-heavy element 112, the team led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Centre for Heavy Ion Research used a 120m-long particle accelerator to fire a beam of zinc ions at lead atom targets. Nuclei of the two elements fused to form the nucleus of the 112 element.

It doesn't all stop there. In 2006, Professor Hofmann's competitors at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, claimed the discovery of element 118. It was made by bombarding a californium target with a beam of calcium ions.

See BBC News.

"Colossal" Magnetoresistance to further revolutionise storage

Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) revolutionised storage since its discovery some 20 years ago, winning the Nobel prize and allowing devices like the iPod to store massive amounts of data in tiny spaces. June 12th edition of Phys Rev Letters published a paper by Yang Ding and team of the Carnegie Institution’s High Pressure Synergetic Center (HPSync) describing a new approach yielding an effect 1000 times more powerful than GMR, dubbed Colossal Magnetoresistance (CMR).

The researchers found that when manganite was subjected to 230,000 times atmospheric pressure it underwent a transition from a ferromagnetic type (electron spins aligned) to an antiferromagnetic type (electron spins opposed). This transition was accompanied by a non-uniform structural Jahn-Teller effect distortion.

There's a long way to go before simple applications of the approach, but what were considered fundamental magnetic reading limits using magnetoresistance effects are again evaporating.

See Carnegie Institution for Science.