High-speed switching at low voltages
Converting electrical signals into optical pulses is one of the speed ‘bottlenecks’ in current telecommunications systems. To reach high data speeds, a series of electro-optic devices call...
Universities receive third funding boost
The JIF scheme is designed to bring facilities at UK universities to the forefront of international research. Nearly £600m has been awarded to 109 projects in 28 different institutions since the ...
Comet Hyakutake makes a mark on Ulysses
Ulysses was launched to make continuous measurements of the solar wind, a steady stream of ionized particles that flows outwards from the star. In 1998 Pete Riley and colleagues from Los Alamos Nation...
Quantum computers think big
The Innsbruck model relies on ions stored in an array of microtraps. Because the microtraps can be fabricated in a solid state device, thousands of traps can be put into an array. The internal quantum...
Read article: Dark-matter dispute intensifies
Dark-matter dispute intensifies
The controversy surrounding evidence for the discovery of “dark matter” particles has heated up following two conflicting talks given at a conference at the end of February. The papers wer...
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...
