Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir was born in the Hague in the Netherlands in 1909 and received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1931. After working with Bohr in Copenhagen and Pauli in Zurich, he joined Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, where he spent the rest of his career. Casimir is best known for […]
However, the resolution possible with scanning near-field optical microscopy (NSOM), as this approach is called, is essentially limited by the size of the aperture. To improve the resolution it is necessary to use ever smaller apertures, or to replace the aperture with an extremely small light source. A team of physicists at the University of […]
The 11-strong panel spent a week in the UK in April and drew on the comments of more than 150 physicists from around the world. The panel’s conclusions were presented at a meeting of UK physics professors in London last Friday by panel chairman, Alex Bradshaw of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in […]
One of the standing jokes that those of us who work on fusion have to suffer every now and then from other physicists is that the best-conserved time invariant in physics is the time to achieve a controlled and sustainable fusion reaction. And certainly that prospect is still at least 25 years away, which only […]
I was recently 60 feet underground in the museum attached to the old operations room of 11 group at Uxbridge, one of the nerve centres of the Battle of Britain, staring at pictures of senior Royal Air Force officers like Sir Hugh Dowding and Sir Arthur Harris. Why, I wondered, were there no pictures of […]
Sam Treiman was a distinguished particle theorist. The famous Goldberger-Treiman relation was, at the time of its discovery in 1958, an amazing connection between the strong and weak interactions. Colleagues used to credit him with “Treiman’s theorem” – impossible things usually don’t happen. Shortly before his untimely death late last year, Treiman wrote a book […]
Examples of lost data include the results of heavy-ion experiments at the Bevelac accelerator at Berkeley. The accelerator stopped running in 1993 but much of the data – which are relevant to research into solar neutrinos, nucleosynthesis and cosmic rays – was never published in any form. “Scientists will have to wait decades before these […]
A conducting fluid needs to have a small ‘seed’ magnetic field before it can generate a self- sustaining field. The seed field induces electric currents in the fluid that in turn create a more powerful, and stable, magnetic field. This creation of the field relies on a positive feedback mechanism. However, the process only works […]
The quantum dot device consists of a transistor made of different layers of gallium arsenide and aluminium gallium arsenide. One of the layers consists entirely of quantum dots just nanometers across. The quantum dots are extremely sensitive to photons. A photon hitting the detector liberates an electron trapped in the one of the dots. A […]
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