Buckyball scores high-temperature goal
Carbon-60 is in a class of organic materials known as fullerenes, which are insulators. Scientists first generated superconductivity – current flow without resistance below a certain ‘tran...
Read article: Rock blasts in from the past
Rock blasts in from the past
Rocks from space have had a bad press recently. The action movies Armageddon and Deep Impact explored what would happen if the Earth was threatened by a huge asteroid impact. Somewhat more down...
Green light for nanomotors
Schmid and colleagues used new microscopy techniques to observe in real time interactions between the tin clusters – each containing hundreds of thousands of atoms – and the copper surface...
Louis Néel and Lochlainn O’Raifeartaigh
Louis Néel was born in Lyons in 1904 and dedicated his career to the study of magnetism. In 1932 he discovered antiferromagnetism – a form of magnetism in which the ‘spins’ on n...
Good news for UK physics
“This budget is seriously good news for UK physics,” Ian Halliday, PPARC chief executive, told PhysicsWeb. “It has provided PPARC’s first real budget increase for 20 years.R...
Descartes prize applauds European cooperation
Dago de Leeuw, a physicist at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands, leads a team of physicists recognized for their pioneering research in plastic electronics. De Leeuw and colleagues from...
First light on silicon laser
The internal energy levels of bulk silicon – in particular its ‘indirect bandgap’ – makes it emit light very inefficiently. Existing lasers are therefore based on ‘direct...
US science awards recognize physics
The US Government makes another presentation next week with the National Medal of Science awards on 1 December. Physicists Willis Lamb and Jeremiah Ostriker receive the medal. Lamb, of the University ...
Complex fluids go through a strange phase
Some liquids are very useful because their molecules act as tiny dipoles that can be aligned by electric or magnetic fields. Vehicle clutches, ink-jet printers and lubricants are among the application...
Magnetism’s standard model gets a facelift
The standard model – developed by Pierre Weiss in 1907 – treats paramagnets as systems of non-interacting magnetic dipoles. The theory successfully describes the behaviour of paramagnets &...
