Southwood received his PhD from Imperial College, London, in 1966 and was appointed as lecturer in the physics department in 1971, where he rose to become head of department in 1984. He studied the propagation of waves in the solar and terrestrial environment, joined the Galileo spacecraft team, and was also involved with the solar […]
Conventional magnetic recording works by changing the magnetisation states of different domains. An in-plane applied magnetic field takes a few nanoseconds to ‘switch’ the domain state. But Back and colleagues were surprised recently to find that a magnetic field applied perpendicular to a cobalt film can also flip magnetisation states (C H Back et al […]
Titan’s atmosphere has much in common with our own: it consists mainly of nitrogen, contains organic material, and exerts a pressure one-and-a half times what we feel on Earth. But Titan receives just 1% of the power that the Earth receives from the Sun. Griffith and co-workers believe that at such low temperatures, the methane […]
Although researchers have proposed a wide variety of explanations for sonoluminescence, they are in broad agreement that the oscillating bubbles reach very high temperatures. Until now, however, single-bubble sonoluminescence has been observed only from air bubbles trapped in water, although very weak emissions have been detected in some alcohols. Suslick and colleagues predicted the necessary […]
Read article: ESA space missions: the next generation
The Bepi-Colombo mission will begin its trip to Mercury, the solar system’s innermost planet, in 2009. The spacecraft is expected to solve some long-standing puzzles about Mercury and provide insights into our own place in the solar system. The second cornerstone project is a satellite-based telescope called GAIA. Scheduled for launch before 2012, GAIA will […]
“We know that cosmic radiation at aircraft altitudes is several orders of magnitude more intense than that experienced at ground level because there is less protection from our atmosphere”, says Bob Bentley, project scientist at MSSL. But scientists are currently unsure how much of the radiation penetrates into the cabins of aircraft and what risk […]
Heeger, MacDiarmid and Shirakawa made their breakthrough in the late 1970s, when they discovered that the electrical conductivity of a certain form of polyacetylene increased by a factor of ten million when it was doped with iodine. Subsequent developments have produced diverse applications for the technology: conductive plastics are used in anti-static materials, filters for […]
In the late 1950s, Weber became intrigued by the relationship between gravitational theory and laboratory experiments. His book, General Relativity and Gravitational Radiation, was published in 1961, and his paper describing how to build a gravitational wave detector first appeared in 1969. Weber’s first detector consisted of a freely suspended aluminium cylinder weighing a few […]
Kroemer and Alferov share the prize for their work on semiconductor heterostructures – devices that contain thin layers of different semiconductors, usually based on gallium arsenide, stacked on top of each other. In 1957 Kroemer, then working at the RCA company in Princeton, published the first proposal for a heterostructure transistor. His theoretical work showed […]
Read article: Shadow cast on dark matter
During the rapid expansion of the universe after the big bang, the ‘outward’ kinetic energy of the explosion fought against the ‘inward’ gravitational pull of matter. The evolution of the universe is therefore directly linked to the amount of mass (or equivalently energy) it contains. The idea of dark matter was proposed to explain why […]
