Cracking the Brazil nut problem
Segregation in a bowl of nuts may be akin to condensation in gases
Author archive
Plutonium puzzle pieced together
A hybrid theory solves the long-standing riddle of the element's structure
Magic material flips refractive index
A radical material with a negative refractive index could revolutionise optoelectronics
Slingshot test for general relativity
The gravitational pull on a spacecraft could be the best test yet of relativity
Internet aids the spread of computer viruses
The structure of the Internet allows viruses to propagate surprisingly easily
Telling left from right in the nucleus
Now a team of nuclear physicists in the US, led by Krzysztof Starosta of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has found the first evidence for the chirality of atomic nuclei (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2001 86 971). Pasteur may have discovered chirality over 150 years ago, but Rod Clark of the Nuclear […]
Shedding new light on an old effect
Now Troy Stevens and co-workers at the University of Michigan in the US and the Max Planck Institute of Solid State Physics in Stuttgart, Germany, have shown that Cerenkov radiation can also be emitted by electric dipoles moving slower than the speed of light (T Stevens et al. 2001 Science 291 627). In their recent […]
What it’s like to be in business
Bob Claridge explains what skills you require to succeed as a physicist in the hard-nosed world of business
Read article: What it’s like to be in business
Clusters challenge common sense
Astronomers have long known that an isolated gravitational system, such as a star, has a negative heat capacity: when energy is added it expands and cools. Now Hellmut Haberland and co-workers at the University of Freiburg in Germany have demonstrated a more down-to-earth example. Recently they have shown that an isolated cluster of 147 sodium […]
Ultrafast electron diffraction shapes up
Now Ahmed Zewail and co-workers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a method of ultrafast electron diffraction that can resolve both the structure of a molecule and its dynamics during a chemical reaction in far greater detail (H Ihee et al. 2001 Science 291 458). The group now plans to investigate the structural […]
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