Researchers at the laboratory first created a superconducting tape five years ago. They used a process known as Ion Beam Assisted Deposition (IBAD) to create a film of the ceramic superconductor yttri...
Read article: The pulsar’s powerhouse
Pulsars are rotating neutron stars that emit radiation, which is seen from Earth as a series of highly regular pulses. Anomalous x-ray pulsars (AXPs) are not, however, powered like most pulsars. AXPs ...
Read article: Martian sedimentary rocks suggest a watery past
One of the key questions in planetary science is whether the early climate of Mars was warm enough for liquid water – and hence extraterrestrial life – to exist. The layered rocks, thought...
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
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...
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 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...
“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...
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...
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...
