Visible invisibility cloak?
Purdue University’s Vladimir Shalaev is giving the following paper tomorrow : “Negative-Index Metamaterials in the Visible Range” (W38 1). Could this be the first invisibility cloak ...
Facts and opinion about graphene
Graphene guru Pablo Jarillo-Herrero of Columbia University set me straight on the miraculous flakes of carbon. -There were 180 papers published on graphene in the last year, but less than 10% were exp...
Commercial high-Tc applications
In my entry on “Rock star physicists” I said that there are no commercially viable applications of high Tc superconductors. I have just discovered that this could be wrong — at least...
Three for medical physics
I just came out of a medical physics press conference that presented three very different ways that physics can be put to use saving lives. The first presentation was from David Nolte of Purdue Univer...
Standing room only for graphene
The room was packed to the rafters for Tsuneya Ando’s talk on “Theory of quantum transport in graphene and nanotubes” (H28 1), which kicked off the first of five focus sessions on gr...
Day two beckons
It’s day two of the March meeting and after cutting my teeth yesterday on some lighter material it’s time to get stuck into some serious physics. The first thing on the agenda is graphene....
Rock star physicists
What do superconductor expert Paul Chu and Jimi Hendrix have in common? They were both on stage at the “Woodstock” of their respective professions — at least according to the APS, wh...
Icicles and hot air
Here’s two things that you probably don’t know about icicles — they are usually filled with liquid water and their shapes are defined by hot air. So says a theory put forth by Martin...
A new spin on windmills
Windmills could someday reduce net global carbon dioxide emissions to zero, says Klaus Lackner of Columbia University. But these aren’t the sort of windmills that generate electricity. Instead, ...
Rocky Mountain physics
I arrived in Denver on Saturday and had a fantastic Sunday touring the mountains with an old physicist friend of mine who lives just outside of the city. While most of our tour involved taking in the ...
