Read article: Nuclear physics with lasers
About 20 years ago Toshi Tajima and John Dawson, then at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggested that laser-produced plasmas could be used to accelerate particles to high energies. The essential feature of their proposal was that the electrons would be accelerated by plasma waves moving at close to the speed of light […]
Two of the outstanding challenges in physics identified in our millennium survey last month were the nature of “dark matter” and a proper understanding of nuclear structure. This month we look at these challenges in greater detail. Dark matter is matter that does not interact with electromagnetic radiation: it cannot be seen with telescopes and […]
Read article: The search for dark matter
Experiments deep underground are searching for new particles that could simultaneously solve one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics and reveal wha's beyond the Standard Model of particle physics
Italy is paying over half of the cost of the SwFr 71million experiment, with voluntary contributions from Belgium, France, Germany and Spain covering the rest. The experiment will start taking data in May 2005. CERN will send around 1018 muon neutrinos to Gran Sasso every year. However, only about 2500 of these will interact with […]
Confirmation that the universe is flat – expanding at just the right rate not to collapse – came from measurements of ripples in the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang. Gamma-ray bursts have been one of the hottest topics in astrophysics in the 1990s and earlier this year astronomers found that a […]
The experiments were carried out by Thomas Udem from the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and colleagues. Udem and colleagues placed four atomic clocks – one rubidium clock, two caesium clocks and a hydrogen maser – in an air conditioned basement at Wessling in Germany and recorded their time difference every 4 seconds […]
Light from the planet is almost completely obliterated by the bright glare from the star. Although the reflected signal is 10-20,000 times weaker than the glare from tau Bootis, the planet studied by Cameron and co-workers is still the brightest and hottest planet among the extra-solar planets discovered so far. It also has one of […]
In quantum teleportation the quantum state of an object held by “Alice” is instantaneously sent to “Bob”. The new technique works by having two optical cavities that both contain a single trapped atom with three energy levels – two ground states and one excited state. The cavities are designed so that the photon emitted when […]
In a series of interviews with a wide cross-section of students who remained in the physics programme, Booth and Ingerman discovered that many students could not adequately explain the links between the basic maths courses and the more advanced physics modules – for example, between Fourier analysis and electromagnetism. They explain that students do not […]
The JIF scheme is funded by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest biomedical research charity. It was set up after several reports found that a shortage of state-of-the-art research equipment was making it difficult for universities in the UK to remain at the forefront of international research. Nearly £320m has been […]
