Wiik was born in Norway in 1937. He moved to Germany in 1956 and after spending several years in the United States, joined the Hamburg laboratory in 1972. At DESY he was a member of the TASSO collaboration, one of four groups studying electron-positron collisions at the PETRA collider. In 1979 the TASSO collaboration won […]
The pairs are created by illuminating a semiconductor quantum well with a pulsed laser diode. A slight voltage difference on the semiconductor keeps the electron and the hole in separate levels inside the quantum well. When the voltage is switched off, the electron-hole pair move together under Coulomb attraction and radiatively recombine – producing a […]
The stellar history of local galaxies is calculated by plotting the different size and brightness of stars in the target galaxy. However, when viewed from Earth, star systems and star clusters can sometimes appear as a single bright star. The photographs taken with the Wide-Field Planetary Camera indicate that this mistake has happened with at […]
Friedman, Kendall and Taylor scattered beams of high-energy electrons from liquid hydrogen and deuterium targets. They found that electrons were more likely to be scattered at large angles than was previously thought. This work paralleled that of Ernest Rutherford, who famously scattered alpha particles from nuclei, pointing to the existence of the atomic nucleus. “Henry […]
Electromagnetically induced transparency relies on interference between different electronic transitions in an atom and has been used to make opaque media transparent at certain wavelengths in the past. In the latest experiment the sodium atoms were trapped and cooled in a magneto-optic trap. The atoms were cooled until they collapsed into a Bose-Einstein condensate – […]
Buckyballs, nanotubes and related structures have great potential for storage applications because their small size offers the possibility of high switching speeds and low power consumption. However, the unusual conducting properties of nanotubes have made it extremely difficult to construct devices. The Michigan-NEC team realised that inserting a positive ion into the buckyball made it […]
Once the balance between ‘fundamentalists’ and noise traders is breached the market becomes more volatile and creates boom or bust cycles. For example, Amazon.com is now worth over $30 billion, 30 times its predicted revenue this year, despite never making a profit. Lux and Marchesi suggests that the increasing numbers of ‘optimistic’ noise traders investing […]
Scientists often complain that the media do not report their work. However, according to Fisher, this is not because journalists are not interested in science but because they have a fear of looking foolish when asking questions. The dunking story, on the other hand, gave journalists the chance to interact with researchers on a topic […]
