Physicists invent “left-handed” material
Four years ago John Pendry of Imperial College, London, described how a composite copper structure could be used to create a material with negative electric permittivity, and more recently he proposed...
Magnetism researchers win Agilent prize
Van der Laan, Carra and Schütz-Gmeineder share the prize for their work on X-ray magnetic dichroism, a technique in which circularly polarized X-rays are used to study magnetic structures. By mea...
New head for ESRF
Stirling is no stranger to Grenoble, having worked at the nearby Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) neutron source for 14 years, and later chairing the ILL scientific council. He currently uses X-rays from ...
Space-based telescope will look for Earth-like planets
“Microlensing is the only way low-mass planets can be detected from the ground,” says Sun Hong Rhie from the University of Notre Dame and a member of MPS team. Rhie and his colleague David...
How to keep your optical fibres clear and dry
Thomas’s group measured the spatial distribution of water in the glass rods from which the optical fibres are drawn. They discovered that water diffuses into the molten, flowing glass much faste...
Physics get physical
For ‘short’ races the average speed of a world-record performance declines sharply with increasing distance. However, above a certain distance, the decline is more gentle. For both running...
Quantum leap for entanglement
Most methods for generating entangled states rely on selecting the entangled pairs, for instance, from a large number of other non-entangled particles. However, last year Klaus Mølmer and Anders ...
New synchrotron will be built at Rutherford
Construction of the new synchrotron is expected to take about five years, and it will cost about £550 m to build and operate the machine over its 20 year lifetime. The Wellcome Trust will contrib...
Astronomers check out the far side of the Sun
Charles Lindsey of the Solar Physics Research Corporation in Arizona and Douglas Braun of Northwest Research Associates in Colorado used data from a Doppler imager on the Solar Heliospheric Observator...
ESA gets flexible
The three space science missions are: STORMS, a set of three spacecraft that will be used to monitor magnetic storms in space; SOLAR ORBITER, a mission to study the surface and atmosphere of the Sun i...
