Helium beam moves into sharper focus
Physicists have tried for years to develop a beam of atoms that could be focused as easily as electrons and photons. The helium atoms are fired at 1 km/s through a micron diameter nozzle past a set of...
Water transfers energy at ultrafast rate
As a water molecule is excited by the laser pulse, it can only drop back to a less excited state by releasing the excess energy. This energy causes the O-H bonds to stretch and vibrate. As the bonds v...
Electrons trapped by laser beam
The experiment was carried out inside a vacuum chamber filled with a low density nitrogen or argon gas. A wave plate – in the form of a small circular piece of material – was inserted into...
Newton tops PhysicsWeb poll
Almost 400 people took part in the PhysicsWeb poll, each one naming their top-five physicists. The votes for each physicist were added up and weighted according to how they were ranked by individual v...
Too many journals in China
The number of papers published by Chinese scientists in journals monitored by the US-based Institute for Scientific Information has grown from 3475 in 1983 to 10 033 in 1997. However, the proportion p...
Clouds puzzles astronomers
Astronomers have argued about high-velocity clouds for over thirty-five years. Wakker and colleagues detected ionized sulphur in one such cloud using the Hubble Space Telescope. According to their cal...
Physicists look to neutrino factory
When charged particles move in a circle they lose energy through synchrotron radiation. However, muons lose much less energy that electrons or positrons because they are 200 times heavier. This reduce...
New upper limit to neutrino mass
The team studied the radioactive decay of germanium 76, which cannot occur by normal beta decay in which one electron and one antineutrino would be emitted. The nucleus can, however, undergo double be...
Brookhaven neutron source to close
The HFBR had become trapped in a economic and political battle between the Department of Energy and the US congress, with the latter refusing to release funds to restart the reactor. Moreover, it was ...
Mountain waves seen from space
Eckermann and Preusse analysed data from the cryogenic infrared spectrometer and telescope for the atmosphere (CRISTA), which was flown on the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1994. They discovered that the ...
