Magnets help tell left from right
Like these so-called chiral molecules, circularly polarized light also comes in right and left-handed varieties, and can be used to produce an excess of one type of molecule. However, circularly polar...
Looking inside quantum dots
Manfred Bayer of the University of Wurzburg in Germany, and co-workers in Wurzburg and the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, studied indium gallium arsenide quantum dots grown on a galliu...
New materials stretch the imagination
The Poisson’s ratio of a material is defined as nij = –ej/ ei, where ej is the lateral strain in the j direction that is caused when a strain ei is applied in the longitudinal i direction....
Physics, polymers and pesticides
Physicists have studied the interaction of water with surfaces for centuries. Felix Savart, for instance, first studied shocks in shallow water in 1833. It is now well known that the maximum diameter ...
RHIC makes its debut
One of RHIC’s main goals is to produce a quark-gluon plasma – the state of matter that is thought to have existed just millionths of a second after the big bang. Quarks are normally confin...
Surface features on Europa explained?
Gaidos and Nimmo say that the tidal forces from Jupiter can cause regions of ice near a fault or defect to move relative to one another. This relative motion causes frictional heating that increases t...
Nanoplotter draws multiple patterns
The researchers used eight ceramic tips that were connected via a cantilever array to an atomic-force microscope. The tips were coated with a molecular ink such as 1-octadecanethiol that diffused from...
Imaging antiferromagnets at the atomic scale
S Heinze and co-workers from the University of Hamburg and X Nie and colleagues from the Forschungszentrum Jülich have used “spin-polarized scanning tunelling microscopy” to image an ...
Boomerang backs flat universe
The geometry of the universe is Euclidean and space is flat. This has now been confirmed from detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background – the radiation left over from the big bang...
Read article: Boomerang backs flat universe
Physics goes inside the ear
In 1960 von Bekesy published the results of his classic measurements on the cochlea, which suggested that the ear was essentially a linear device. However, von Bekesy conducted his experiments on cada...
