Polymer outshines other mirrors
Dielectric mirrors are made of multiple layers of transparent materials, each of which reflects a small fraction of the light that hits it. At a specific layer thickness, the reflected light waves mer...
Double first for superfluids
Helium-3 flows without friction when it is cooled below the superfluid transition temperature of 2.6 millikelvin. In the superfluid state the helium-3 atoms, which are fermions and therefore obey the ...
The hard X-ray background comes into view
The CXB covers a range of photon energies, with a peak around 40 kiloelectron volts (keV). The soft X-ray part of the background – photon energies between about 0.5 and 2 keV – was extensi...
New tools for X-rays
Klaus Dieter Liss from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, and colleagues have created a cavity that traps X-ray photons between two thin plates of silicon (Nature 404 371...
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...
