Phillips and his colleagues produced a focused directional output from the Bose-Einstein condensate by firing two laser beams into the condensate. One beam adds energy to the atoms, while the second stimulates them to emit photons and drop down to a lower energy state. As the photons of the second laser beam have slightly less […]
Read article: Matter makes waves
Both the French-Italian gravity-wave interferometer, called VIRGO, and the LIGO interferometers in the US are designed to detect very weak gravity waves by using lasers to monitor test masses placed at the ends of the arms of the interferometer. The arms in VIRGO are 3 km long, while those in LIGO are 4 km long. […]
Murray and Holman ran numerical simulations of the planets positions over a 200 million year period using their new technique. They discovered that although the outer planets appear in stable orbits, over longer time scales their classical ‘predicted’ orbit diverges from the simulations due to chaotic effects. One resonance is caused by interactions between Jupiter, […]
Tai Chang Chiang and co-workers at Urbana confined electrons in thin films of silver ranging from 1 monolayer to around 100 monolayers thick. Just as photons resonate back and forth in an optical Fabry-Perot interferometer, the Urbana team showed that electrons bounced back and forth from the two surfaces of the silver film. They used […]
Richard Canfield and David McKenzie from Montana State University in the US, and Hugh Hudson from the Solar Physics Research Corporation in Japan, analysed two years worth of images from the X-ray satellite Yohkoh. In addition to the link between sigmoids and solar flares, they also confirmed that there was a link between solar flares […]
Last Monday Fermilab issued a press release titled “Fermilab physicists find new matter-antimatter asymmetry”. On Thursday CERN replied with a statement which read: “The CERN physics community offers its congratulations to their colleagues from the KTeV experiment at Fermilab for their exciting new data on the observation of direct CP violation in neutral kaon decays […]
“Heisenberg is an intelligent man, but a typical German (that is to say a Tacitus).” So wrote Albert Einstein to his Swiss confidant Carl Seelig, in January 1953. Although the quotation does not appear in this book by the American historian Paul Rose, everything else that one could possibly say against Werner Heisenberg and his […]
Witherell received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1973 and became an assistant professor at Princeton University in 1975. He moved to Santa Barbara in 1981 and in 1990 won the American Physical Society’s Panofsky Prize for experiments on charm quarks at Fermilab. Witherell has also been chair of the Department of Energy’s […]
Seaborg shared the 1951 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with the physicist Edwin McMillan. In addition to a long career at the University of California and the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, both in Berkeley, Seaborg was also chancellor of the University of California and head of the Atomic Energy Commission. During the Second World War he was […]
In Fink and Mao’s method the space surrounding the tie is split into three sections: left, centre and right. To begin the wide end of the tie is passed either over or under the narrow part. The knotting process then continues with a series of half turns or moves either towards or away from the […]
