Read article: Carbon nanotubes roll on
Carbon nanotubes roll on
The remarkable properties of carbon nanotubes may allow them to play a crucial role in the relentless drive towards miniaturization at the nanometre scale
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Read article: Carbon nanotubes roll on
Read article: Multiwall carbon nanotubes
Multiwall carbon nanotubes
The unique mechanical and electronic properties of multiwall nanotubes are proving to be a rich source of new physics and could also lead to new applications in materials and devices
Read article: Biological lessons for physicists
Biological lessons for physicists
Interdisciplinary research is currently in fashion, and no interface is more in vogue than that between physics and biology. But whereas the subject matter of, say, chemical physics or materials physics is relatively well defined, there is no such agreement on what constitutes biological physics, and no broad research programme to follow. Even the name […]
Could Maxwell have deciphered quantum mechanics?
There is no doubt that quantum theory has been remarkably successful and has passed every experimental test it has been subject to. But the interpretation of quantum theory – in particular the meaning of the wavefunction, the role of observers, and the question of what happens to the state of a system during a measurement […]
New insights into surfaces
Berndt and co-workers prepared gold, silver and copper surfaces with standard techniques and then used a scanning tunnelling microscope with a specially prepared tungsten tip to identify regions on the surface that were free from defects. The advantage of this technique over others, such as photoelectron spectroscopy, is that the same instrument that is used […]
Not all clusters are the same
Smaller clusters tend to have elongated shapes, and the energy of formation is essentially independent of the number of atoms in the cluster. Larger clusters are spherical and the formation energy is inversely proportional to the cube root of the number of atoms. Such detailed knowledge of the energetics of cluster formation is needed to […]
Phenomenology success for Durham
The institute has been established for 10 years in the first instance, with the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) investing £7m and the University of Durham investing £5m. Durham already has a strong track record in phenomenology lead by James Stirling, who is director-designate of the new institute. To begin with the institute […]
The many shapes of lead-186
Mark Huyse from the University of Leuven in Belgium and co-workers in Germany, Slovakia, the UK, Finland, Russia, Sweden and Belgium studied lead-186, which contains 82 protons and 104 neutrons. 82 is a “magic number” in nuclear physics, which confers special properties on nuclei with this number of neutrons or protons. Moreover, 104 is mid-way […]
PPARC starts to identify its priorities
The particle physics panel identified three projects related to the Large Hadron Collider – a 14 TeV proton-proton collider that is due to start in 2005 at CERN – as top priority. These were a computational grid to handle the data from the LHC, an increase in human resources for experiments, and increased support for […]
US astronomers look to the future
The other priorities established by the panel are the ground-based 30-metre Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope, the space-based Constellation-X Observatory, expansion of the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, a ground-based 6.5 metre survey telescope, and the Terrestrial Planet Finder. The panel describe this last mission as “the most ambitious space mission ever attempted […]
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