Quantized electrical conductance was confirmed in experiments with very narrow conducting wires in the late 1980s. The electrons move through the wire along quantum channels, each of which contributes a quantum unit of 2e2/h to the conductance, where e is the charge on the electron and h is the Planck constant. As the voltage difference […]
All the matter and radiation in the universe was created by the big bang. The radiation stopped interacting with the matter about 300,000 years later – when the universe had cooled down enough for electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms. The fact that the CMB has a perfect black-body spectrum with a temperature of […]
Read article: The universe is flat – official
Moffatt became interested in the problem while looking for Christmas presents for his grandchildren. “I came across the toy in a mail order catalogue and thought it sounded interesting,” he says. After playing with the toy he became intrigued with the physics behind Euler’s disk. “The disk is continually losing energy throughout the process,” he […]
Read article: The physics of a spinning coin
“This renewal of funding will permit TRIUMF to become a world leader in particle physics research,” said Arthur Carty, President of National Research Council. “It will also retain and attract the leading scientific talent that is essential to build an innovative, knowledge-based economy.” “The federal government is strongly committed to science and technology and has […]
Fundamental physics is a new activity for ESA, although it has ambitious plans to launch LISA, a set of three spacecraft that would detect gravitational waves. It is also considering proposals to test the equivalence of inertial mass and gravitational mass. The other main areas of overlap discussed at the meeting were cosmology, neutrinos, dark […]
Recently a “second decade” working group looked at the future of the billion-dollar telescope, which is funded by NASA and the European Space Agency. After ten years in orbit, what more can Hubble do? “A lot of little science has been explored with relatively short observation periods,” says Ethan Schreier, assistant director at the STScI, […]
Read article: Hubble prepares for the next ten years
There has been speculation over the long term future of DERA and its 11 500 employees – 9 000 of whom are research scientists – since 1998 when the government’s strategic defence review recommended that the agency should be privatised. However, union officials, the House of Commons select committee on defence, and the US government […]
When Murray Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969, his colleague at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, said: “This event marks the public recognition of what we have known for a long time, that Murray Gell-Mann is the leading theoretical physicist of today. The development during the last 20 years […]
Tim Berners-Lee’s name will be familiar to most readers of Physics World as the one-time Oxford physics student who, while working at the CERN particle-physics lab in Geneva, invented the World Wide Web – a feat for which he has received numerous awards, including an OBE in 1997. Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of the […]
The neutron scattering experiments were carried out by Herb Mook from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and colleagues, while the ion channelling experiments were performed by Rajeshwar Sharma from the University of Maryland and co-workers. Mook and co-workers showed that certain magnetic fluctuations in YBCO are one-dimensional – as would be expected if the stripe […]
