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 […]
“When I helped create PhysicsWeb nearly three years ago, I was sure that it would be a successful site. However, sites such as PhysicsWeb do not rely solely on one individual, and I would like to thank Lloyd Fletcher, James Counihan, Martin Kelly, Chris Brown and all the Physics World editorial team for their support […]
Read article: ‘The Quantum Project’ hits the Web
The 32-minute film can be downloaded from Sightsound.com. Viewers are charged $3.95 to view it for up to five days, with a higher charge for permanent downloads. The film’s makers, Metafilmics, are hailing The Quantum Project as “every bit as groundbreaking as The Jazz Singer“, the first film to include speech. “We feel this is […]
