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 […]
I just came out of a medical physics press conference that presented three very different ways that physics can be put to use saving lives. The first presentation was from David Nolte of Purdue University who has created a very simple but effective way of measuring motion inside cancer cells. The technique involves splitting a […]
The room was packed to the rafters for Tsuneya Ando’s talk on “Theory of quantum transport in graphene and nanotubes” (H28 1), which kicked off the first of five focus sessions on graphene. Although it may still be too early to call, I’d say that graphene will be THE topic of this year’s meeting. I […]
It’s day two of the March meeting and after cutting my teeth yesterday on some lighter material it’s time to get stuck into some serious physics. The first thing on the agenda is graphene. There are at least a half a dozen sessions on graphene this year, not bad for a material that’s only been […]
What do superconductor expert Paul Chu and Jimi Hendrix have in common? They were both on stage at the “Woodstock” of their respective professions — at least according to the APS, which today celebrated the 20th anniversary of a special session on high Tc superconductivity that was held at the 1987 March Meeting in New […]
Here’s two things that you probably don’t know about icicles — they are usually filled with liquid water and their shapes are defined by hot air. So says a theory put forth by Martin Short of the University of California at Los Angeles in his talk “How the icicle got its shape” (B7.00003). Icicles elongate […]
Windmills could someday reduce net global carbon dioxide emissions to zero, says Klaus Lackner of Columbia University. But these aren’t the sort of windmills that generate electricity. Instead, they scrub carbon dioxide from the air passing through them — much like a conventional smokestack scrubber. In his talk “The future of fossil fuels” (A2.00003), Lackner […]
