Potential New Particle or Fifth Fundamental Force?

Fermilab scientists today announced an anomaly in their collision data at the Tevatron which could point to a previously unknown subatomic particle, or according to some a possible new extremely short distance fifth fundamental force. Either result, if verified would be one of the most important discoveries in Physics in recent decades.

See New York Times and the paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0699

Discovery of extrasolar "earths"

Scientists have discovered multiple candidate planets that may support life, using the Kepler space telescope.

See BBC Website.

2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for optical fibres and the CCD

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Charles K. Kao (50%) for "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication" and to Willard S. Boyle & George E. Smith (25% each) for "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor".

See nobelprize.org.
Nobel information on Twitter: twitter.com/Nobelprize_org

Nanolaser breakthrough crucial for optical computer miniaturisation

A new nanolaser device, called a "spaser," has been developed and is the first of its kind to emit visible light. It represents a critical component for possible future technologies based on "nanophotonic" circuitry.



The spasers contain a gold core surrounded by a silica shell filled with OG-488 green dye in spheres totalling 44nm in diameter. When a light was shone on the spheres, plasmons generated by the gold core were amplified by the dye. The plasmons were then converted to photons of visible light, which was emitted as a laser. The "spaser-based nanolasers" research is detailed in a paper appearing online in the journal Nature that reports on work conducted by researchers at Purdue, Norfolk State University and Cornell University.

See Purdue University.

Feynman Messenger Series lectures online in video lecture format

Bill Gates has personally made available a number of classic films of Richard Feynman's Messenger Series lectures from Cornell which are well worth watching.



Gates explains: "..we went to some university catalogs, including University of California system had a catalog of films, and got a lot of health, biology, physics type films--those are those metal cans with big reels--and then we had a projector in a room that we made dark. So even (during) the day, you could thread these films. And there were a lot of interesting ones, but these Feynman lectures that he gave at Cornell...those were just unbelievably good."

"After that, I got them put onto videotape, and I got rights to make a small number of videotapes. It was VHS tape at the time, and send it around to some friends who might be interested. But I always had in the back of my mind that it was kind of a crime that there wasn't broad availability of those things, particularly for young people thinking about science."

See Project Tuva.

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.

Wolfram|Alpha does intelligent answering

A new breed of search system designed to answer questions, rather than simply list websites, is gaining a lot of momentum in technology and science. Developed by Wolfram, the company responsible for Mathematica, it's a fun system to play with and has some real utility for fast answers to mathematics, scientific formulae and technical queries. Check out these physics example:

See Wolfram|Alpha Physics.

Physics Nobel Laureate Carl Weinman to talk at DIT

Dr Carl Wieman,winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001, has devoted much of his energies in recent years to improving the teaching of science in higher education and has established inter alia the Carl Wieman Science Education Institute (CWSEI) based at the University of British Columbia. He will two presentations at DIT as follows:

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“Science education in the 21st Century; using the methods of science to teach science”
Monday 18th May 2009, Michael O’Donnell Theatre, DIT Bolton Street, Dublin 1, 2.30 p.m to 4.30 p.m

Dr Wieman will discuss the failures of traditional educational practices, even as used by “very good” teachers and the successes of some new practices and technology that characterise this more effective approach and how these results are highly consistent with findings from cognitive science. This session is intended for lecturers in science, engineering and environmental health.

Please contact brian.bowe@dit.ie to reserve a place

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“A new model for transforming the teaching of science in higher education”
Tuesday 19th May 2009, Michael O’Donnell Theatre, DIT Bolton Street, Dublin 1, 9.30 a.m to 11.30 a.m.

This session will go into depth about how to implement the principles for achieving effective learning and retention that have now been empirically established. This session is intended for lecturers in all disciplines including those with responsibility for managing and/or developing the teaching processes.

Please contact jen.harvey@dit.ie to reserve a place.

Holographic storage puts 100 DVDs on a single disc

General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs. The storage technique, which G.E. is detailing next Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices. The holographic process consists of data encoded in light patterns that are stored in light-sensitive material.

Holographic storage has the potential to pack data far more densely than conventional optical technology, used in DVDs and the newer, high-capacity Blu-ray discs, in which information is stored as a pattern of marks across the surface of a disc. The potential of holographic technology has long been known. The first research papers were published in the early 1960s.

See New York Times.

Rydberg Molecule moves from theory to fact

The theoretical Rydberg molecule has been formed. This new kind of molecule is formed through an extremely weak chemical bond between two atoms. The new type of bonding, reported in Nature, occurs because one of the two atoms in the molecule has an electron very far from its nucleus or centre which can trap another nearby atom into a very distant chemical bond. The Rydberg molecules in question were formed from two atoms of rubidium - one a Rydberg atom with a distant electron, and one a "normal" atom.

The experiments use an ultracold cloud of rubidium bringing the atoms in the gas closer together as they cool. They then excite an atom to the "Rydberg state" using a laser. At temperatures very close to absolute zero the critical bonding distance of about 100nm between the atoms is reached. This gap is vast compared to ordinary molecules.

"The Rydberg electron resembles a sheepdog that keeps its flock together by roaming speedily to the outermost periphery of the flock, and nudging back towards the centre any member that might begin to drift away," said one of the exerpimenters, Professor Greene. Pushing this electron out to its distant periphery to make a Rydberg atom requires energy. "We excite the atoms to the Rydberg stage with a laser," explained Dr Bendkowsky.

See BBC News.

Cheap balloon approach to focus solar energy

Cool Earth Solar of California has come up with a cheap and novel idea for focussing the sun's rays on small solar cells that might tackle the cost efficiency ratio issue for solar cells in quite a different way - metalised balloons.

"Anyone who has children will be familiar with aluminised party balloons. Such balloons are made from metal-coated plastic. Cool Earth’s insight was that if you coat only one half of a balloon, leaving the other transparent, the inner surface of the coated half will act as a concave mirror. Put a solar cell at the focus of that mirror and you have an inexpensive solar-energy collector."

See Economist Technology Quarterly.

Cold fusion, this time for real?

Twenty years to the day that two electrochemists ignited controversy by announcing signs of cold fusion at an infamous press conference in Utah, a separate team has made a similar claim in the same US state. But this time, the evidence is being taken more seriously.

See newscientist.

Nobel Laureate Weinberg to give public lecture

Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg will give a public lecture on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009, 3:00 pm at Theatre A, Science Lecture Block, UCD on ‘The Craft of Science and the Craft of Art’.

"Fossil imprint" of Tycho Brahe's 1572 supernova reported in Nature.

'In 1572, a "new star" appeared in the sky which stunned astronomers and exploded ancient theories of the universe.

Now the supernova recorded by Tycho Brahe has been glimpsed again, by Max Planck Institute scientists. They used telescopes in Hawaii and Spain to capture faint light echoes of the original explosion, reflected by interstellar dust. This "fossil imprint" of Tycho's famous supernova is reported in Nature.

The study will help solve a 400-year-old mystery over the nature of the celestial event which captivated observers across the globe.'

The link below has a movie as well as further details.

See BBC News.

The Large Hadron Collider: Shedding Light on the Dark Universe

If you missed it, you can now watch online "The Large Hadron Collider: Shedding Light on the Dark Universe", the talk by Prof. Rolf-Dieter Heuer. Recorded November 24th at the RDS by HEAnet.

The world may soon have a deeper understanding than ever before about the origins and workings of the Universe thanks to the remarkable Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Built in a tunnel one kilometre beneath Switzerland’s Jura mountains, this €4 billion physics experiment will smash atoms together at colossal speeds to create energies not seen since just after the Big Bang.

See streamed lecture.

Antimatter creation now feasible in the laboratory

Physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a new technique to generate beams of antimatter particles. Using a gold sample the size of the head of a thumb tack, a laser is shot through it producing more than 100 billion positrons per pulse emitted in a cone-shaped plasma “jet.”

This ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts.

In the experiment, the laser ionises and accelerates electrons, which are driven through the gold target. On their way, the electrons interact with the gold nuclei, which serve as a catalyst to create positrons. The electrons give off packets of pure energy, which decays into matter and anti-matter, following the predictions by Einstein’s mass-energy equation. By concentrating the energy in space and time, the laser produces positrons more rapidly and in greater density than ever before in the laboratory.

See Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory PR.

Perimeter Institute publishes live physics resources

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics has published on its website a section on hot topics in modern physics on the 'What We Research' outreach page. The info includes text, graphics and online presentations dealing with Cosmology, Superstring Theory, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Information and Particle Physics. The resource section at the bottom of each page recommends a wealth of interesting online lectures by some famous scientists.

See Perimeter Institute.

2008 Nobel Prize in Physics breaks symmetry

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics relates to broken symmetry discoveries which led to the quark model.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008 with half to Yoichiro Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" and the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan and Toshihide Maskawa,Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".

See Nobel Prize Announcement.

Spin-torque nanomagnet switching breaks speed limits

Dynamic Static Random Access Memory (DRAM) and Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) require constant power in order to retain memory. Using a magnetic memory chip known as Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM), information can be stored in the form of magnetization. The newest generation of MRAM employs the spin-torque effect for programming the magnetic bits. By using a current pulse, the spin-torque can be controlled and the memory state of the cell can be programmed. An experiment performed at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Germany has uncovered that a spin-torque switching of a nanomagnet is as fast as what is permitted according to the fundamental laws of physics’ limit.

This method of switching, also named ballistic switching, could allow for increased speeds in future non-volatile magnetic memories.

See thefutureofthings.com.