Phenomenology success for Durham
The institute has been established for 10 years in the first instance, with the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) investing £7m and the University of Durham investing £...
The many shapes of lead-186
Mark Huyse from the University of Leuven in Belgium and co-workers in Germany, Slovakia, the UK, Finland, Russia, Sweden and Belgium studied lead-186, which contains 82 protons and 104 neutrons. 82 is...
PPARC starts to identify its priorities
The particle physics panel identified three projects related to the Large Hadron Collider – a 14 TeV proton-proton collider that is due to start in 2005 at CERN – as top priority. These we...
US astronomers look to the future
The other priorities established by the panel are the ground-based 30-metre Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope, the space-based Constellation-X Observatory, expansion of the Very Large Array radio teles...
Hendrik Casimir and John Ward
Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir was born in the Hague in the Netherlands in 1909 and received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1931. After working with Bohr in Copenhagen and Pauli in Zurich, he...
Single molecules demonstrate resolving power
However, the resolution possible with scanning near-field optical microscopy (NSOM), as this approach is called, is essentially limited by the size of the aperture. To improve the resolution it is nec...
How good is physics in the UK?
The 11-strong panel spent a week in the UK in April and drew on the comments of more than 150 physicists from around the world. The panel’s conclusions were presented at a meeting of UK physics ...
Data, data everywhere
Examples of lost data include the results of heavy-ion experiments at the Bevelac accelerator at Berkeley. The accelerator stopped running in 1993 but much of the data – which are relevant to re...
Mini Earth created in the lab
A conducting fluid needs to have a small ‘seed’ magnetic field before it can generate a self- sustaining field. The seed field induces electric currents in the fluid that in turn create a ...
Quantum dots detect single photons
The quantum dot device consists of a transistor made of different layers of gallium arsenide and aluminium gallium arsenide. One of the layers consists entirely of quantum dots just nanometers across....
