In his original thought experiment, Schrodinger imagined that a cat is locked in a box, along with a radioactive atom that is connected to a vial containing a deadly poison. If the atom decays, it causes the vial to smash and the cat to be killed. When the box is closed we do not know […]
Read article: UK loses ground in optics boom
Optics is widely seen as a key technology for the 21st century
Spectroscopy – the measurement of the properties of light emitted or absorbed by matter – is one of our most powerful tools to study nature. When a prism is used to separate the light from a flame in which salt has been sprinkled, distinct yellow lines become visible in addition to the usual colours of […]
Read article: A new framework for Europe
Philippe Busquin, the European Union’s commissioner for research, has moved with remarkable speed since he was appointed last September. By January he had published a consultation paper on his big idea, the “European research area” – an initiative that was welcomed by science organizations across Europe – and by last month his plans had received […]
Read article: How to survive the 21st century
What is happening to the subject that we have loved and served? More than any other discipline, physics has transformed the face of civilization, particularly during the last century. It has developed techniques and insights that have propelled chemistry, biology and medicine to new heights. It has led to the genesis of modern engineering and […]
Read article: Optical data storage enters a new dimension
Holographic data storage promises increased storage densities and improved access times that could lead to a new range of novel memory devices
The origin of gamma-ray bursts is one of the biggest unsolved problems in astrophysics. Some 3000 of these short-lived bursts of intense gamma-rays have been detected in the last three decades, but it is only recently that astrophysicists have confirmed that they originate outside our galaxy. The burst of 25 April 1998 surprised astronomers because […]
In a Bose-Einstein condensate a gas of atoms is cooled until the de Broglie wavelength of the atoms exceeds the inter-atom spacing. If the atoms are bosons – that is, if they have a “spin” of 0, h/2p, 2(h/2p), 3(h/2p) and so on, where h is the Planck constant – they all collapse into the […]
Manfred Bayer of the University of Wurzburg in Germany, and co-workers in Wurzburg and the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, studied indium gallium arsenide quantum dots grown on a gallium arsenide surface (M Bayer et al. 2000 Nature 405 923). The dots measured about 20 nanometres across. Meanwhile, a group lead by Khaled […]
Like these so-called chiral molecules, circularly polarized light also comes in right and left-handed varieties, and can be used to produce an excess of one type of molecule. However, circularly polarized light is quite rare in nature and is not thought to be the source of the “homochirality of nature”. This problem greatly puzzled Louis […]
