APS memorabilia: these will be worth a fortune on eBay someday. I actually didn’t buy an APS t-shirt — or a bumper sticker, slinky or travel mug — but I’m still glad I came to Denver. Here’s some miscellany I learned today. • There are no guns allowed in the Colorado Convention Center — but […]
What’s the best way to determine the structure of a molecule that cannot be integrated within a periodic lattice? Blow the heck out of it using x-ray pulses from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) — at least according to SLACs Philip Bucksbaum. The LCLS will open next year at SLAC in California and will […]
IOP Publishing’s reception was a big hit last night, judging by the fact that the buffet had to be replenished several times — you can work up a huge appetite running back and forth between sessions for nearly 10 hours a day. I spent most of my time talking to IOP referees and journal board […]
Some of the most interesting condensed matter physics occurs at very low temperatures and physicists need accurate ways of knowing just how cold their samples are. Traditionally, this has meant spending hours building, calibrating and troubleshooting temperature measurement and control systems — instead of actually doing the experiments. Those days are over in many labs […]
I was having so much fun with the physicists that I nearly forgot to check out the exhibition before it closed for good this afternoon. First stop was the IOP Publishing stand where I had a chat with Sharice Collins, who is our senior marketing manager for the Americas. Sharice is based in our Philly […]
Here’s a new recipe from Jeffrey Brinker of the University of New Mexico (P42 1) Mix together water, alcohol, detergent, silica and a good dollop of single-cell organisms. Dip in a substrate of your choice. Remove and let dry. While you do the washing up, the silica, detergent and cells will be busy organizing themselves […]
What? Not Mott? Pots not dots, lots per pot …and hot! You can only get away with describing your experiment with a poem if you have a Nobel Prize — and JILA’s Eric Cornell has one of them. The pots are the wells within a two-dimensional optical lattice and they were filled with lots of […]
Purdue University’s Vladimir Shalaev is giving the following paper tomorrow : “Negative-Index Metamaterials in the Visible Range” (W38 1). Could this be the first invisibility cloak for visible light? Shalaev has already worked out a way to make metamaterials that respond magnetically to visible light, and has come tantalizingly close to creating negative index materials […]
Graphene guru Pablo Jarillo-Herrero of Columbia University set me straight on the miraculous flakes of carbon. -There were 180 papers published on graphene in the last year, but less than 10% were experimental. -If it’s five or more atomic layers thick, then it’s just plain old graphite. -If it’s 1-2 layers thick, the electrons think […]
In my entry on “Rock star physicists” I said that there are no commercially viable applications of high Tc superconductors. I have just discovered that this could be wrong — at least according to Alexis Malozemoff of American Superconductor Corporation. In his talk “Transforming the Grid with Superconductivity” (L1 5), Malozemoff said that the company […]
