New phase for quantum computers
One of the biggest challenges in quantum computation is to built “fault tolerant” logic gates. In the mid-1990s it was shown that this requires the time evolution of a quantum sub-system t...
Atom opticians think small
Mara Prentiss and colleagues at Harvard University in the US mounted two short wires on a sapphire substrate (Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 1124). When electric currents flow in opposite directions through the ...
Black holes ‘mimic’ the Sun
The team claim to have evidence for: an thin outer layer that is hot; a warm middle layer that is also optically thick; and a “cold” inner layer. The similarity of these layers to that of ...
Climate discrepancy solved
Previously is was thought that the result might have been due to some inadequacy in the data for the troposphere. However, Dian Gaffen from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and c...
New light on organic LEDs
Light emission from organic materials occurs through two separate processes: fluorescence – the process by which today’s organic semiconductors produce light – and phosphorescence. I...
Conductivity measurements made on a single strand of DNA
The Delft group fabricated the electrodes by making a slit in a silicon nitride film with standard lithography. A series of platinum layers were then sputtered across the slit until the gap was reduce...
Life, longevity, and a $6000 bet
The disagreement stems from a paper Gott published in Nature several years ago and recently discussed in the New Yorker magazine. In this paper Gott proposed a formula that suggests that by knowing ho...
Molecules made in a Bose-Einstein Condensate
Molecules are poor candidates for the standard techniques used to create Bose-Einstein condensates because of their complicated internal vibrational and rotational structures. But by creating the mole...
Read article: X-ray telescope burns-up
X-ray telescope burns-up
Meanwhile, ESA this week released the first two images from XMM-Newton. One shows the Magellanic Cloud, with hot gas released from supernova explosions and new stars being created in a interstellar nu...
CERN claims quark-gluon first
In the CERN experiments a 33 TeV lead ion beam was crashed into targets made of lead and gold inside the seven different experimental detectors. The collisions created energy densities twenty times th...
