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Carbon nanotubes capture cancer cells

Researchers in the US have made a new device capable of detecting cancer cells and viruses. The device could eventually be developed into low-cost tests for doctors to use in developing countries where expensive diagnostic equipment is hard to come by, says team leader Mehmet Toner at Massachusetts General Hospital.

It is usually a challenge to detect single cancer cells in a blood sample because they are present in very small amounts – just a few cells per millilitre of sample. These “circulating” cancer cells, as they are known, are those that have broken away from the original tumour site and indicate that a cancer has metastasized, decreasing a patient’s chance of survival. It is thus crucial to be able to detect them. “Of all deaths from cancer, 90% are not the result of cancer at the primary site but from tumours that have spread from the original site,” explained team member Brian Wardle at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Toner and colleagues had made an earlier version of their device four years ago that consisted of thousands of nanometre-sized silicon “posts” confined inside microfluidic channels. The posts were coated (or “functionalized”) with antibodies that preferentially stick to certain types of tumour cell. When a blood sample was passed through the device (at around 2 ml per hour), tumour cells in the sample that came into contact with the posts became trapped.

Porosity is the key

However, the problem with this configuration was that some cancer cells passed through the device without contacting the posts at all. Toner’s team has now overcome this problem by making the posts porous instead of solid. In this way, the cells flow through the posts as well as around them. This means the cells have a greater chance of touching the posts and sticking to them.

The new porous posts were designed by Wardle, who is an aeronautics engineer. Such nano-engineered structures are usually studied with the goal of making advanced composite material for stronger aircraft parts.

The posts in the new device are made of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes instead of silicon and can collect cancer cells eight times better than the solid posts, say the researchers. Carbon nanotubes are rolled up sheets of carbon atoms and assemblies of the tubes are highly porous. Indeed, an array of carbon nanotubes – which can contain up to 100 billion carbon nanotubes per square centimetre – is 99% air.

As in the original device, the researchers functionalize the surface of each nanotube with different antibodies that stick to a particular type of cancer cell. But that’s not all: changing the configuration of the nanotubes also allows them to capture different sized objects – for example, cells that are around 10 µm in diameter, all the way down to viruses, which can be as small as just 40 nm.

Coated in antibodies

Toner and Wardle’s team has proved that its device works by detecting a variety of bacteria and viruses, including fluorescent labelled Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria. The researchers did this by coating the micofluidic device with anti-S. Pneumoniae antibody. They also succeeded in detecting human leukocytes, taken from healthy volunteers, and coating the devices with anti-CD4 antibodies.

“Sample preparation and filtering is crucial when working directly with complex biological samples, such as blood,” commented Hatice Altug of Boston University, who was not involved in the work. “In this respect, it is very exciting to see that this device can very effectively capture and separate target bioparticles across multiple size scales, ranging from viruses to bacteria and cells.”

And, since the technology is also compatible with large-area and low-cost manufacturing, it could find a wide range of applications in diagnostics, she added.

The MIT team is now working on tailoring the device so that it can detect HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The current work was detailed in Small DOI:10.1002/smll.201002076.

Rivalry drives Higgs hunt

Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are confident that they can find the Higgs boson by the end of 2012, when the machine will be shut down temporarily. This video report for physicsworld.com brings an update from the particle-physics lab near Geneva on the search for the Higgs and new physics beyond the Standard Model.

The most sought after particle in particle physics – the Higgs boson – is believed to endow all other particles with mass. It is also the last undiscovered component of particle physicists’ great theoretical framework – the Standard Model. After decades searching for the Higgs in particle collisions at CERN, and at Fermilab in the US, researchers at the LHC believe they may finally have the elusive particle within their grasp.

If one of us will be able to provide the first hints of a signal, the other will be able to confirm it or disprove it Guido Tonelli

“I’m confident that we’ll be able to give an answer, a definite answer; this is without any doubt,” says Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for the CMS experiment. “Clearly this will depend – touch wood – on the good performance of the machine, the accelerator and the good performance of the detector.” Tonelli says that to prove or exclude the existence of the Higgs within the predicted mass region of 115–600 GeV they would probably need all of the data collected from the CMS detector in 2011 and 2012.

Meanwhile, at CERN’s other general purpose detector, the ATLAS experiment, researcher Pippa Wells is equally upbeat. “If it has the very well predicted properties of the theory it can’t escape us over the next couple of years,” she says. Wells reiterates that so long as the accelerator keeps providing the proton–proton collisions then they will have enough data to find a Standard Model Higgs.

There’s certainly a friendly rivalry, shall we say, to make sure that we’re in top shape Pippa Wells

In this special video report Wells is also asked whether there is competition between the two collaborations involved in ATLAS and CMS, given the prizes that would surely follow a Higgs discovery. “There’s certainly a friendly rivalry, shall we say, to make sure that we’re in top shape, [that] we’re collecting data efficiently, that we’re looking for all the different possible sorts of new physics,” she says.

Tonelli believes that this internal division will play an important role in searching for the Higgs and making a discovery acceptable to the outside world. “If one of us will be able to provide the first hints of a signal, the other will be able to confirm it or disprove it. The two technologies are completely independent so it is very healthy to have this kind of internal competition.”

Music for the video was provided by the UK group, the Spires.

And the excitement about an imminent Higgs discovery is shared on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean by Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall. In this recent audio interview, Randall talks about the beauty of the Higgs mechanism and the bright future of particle physics. She also shares her disappointment with the decision in the US to close the Tevatron Collider at Fermilab later this year.

Q&A
Q&A

 

The hunt for the elusive Higgs

Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are confident that they can find the Higgs boson by the end of 2012, when the machine will be shut down temporarily. This video report for physicsworld.com brings an update from the particle-physics lab near Geneva on the search for the Higgs and new physics beyond the Standard Model.

The most sought after particle in particle physics – the Higgs boson – is believed to endow all other particles with mass. It is also the last undiscovered component of particle physicists' great theoretical framework – the Standard Model. After decades searching for the Higgs in particle collisions at CERN, and at Fermilab in the US, researchers at the LHC believe they may finally have the elusive particle within their grasp.

"I'm confident that we'll be able to give an answer, a definite answer; this is without any doubt," says Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for the CMS experiment. "Clearly this will depend – touch wood – on the good performance of the machine, the accelerator and the good performance of the detector." Tonelli says that to prove or exclude the existence of the Higgs within the predicted mass region of 115–600 GeV they would probably need all of the data collected from the CMS detector in 2011 and 2012.

Meanwhile, at CERN's other general purpose detector, the ATLAS experiment, researcher Pippa Wells is equally upbeat. "If it has the very well predicted properties of the theory it can't escape us over the next couple of years," she says. Wells reiterates that so long as the accelerator keeps providing the proton–proton collisions then they will have enough data to find a Standard Model Higgs.

In this special video report Wells is also asked whether there is competition between the two collaborations involved in ATLAS and CMS, given the prizes that would surely follow a Higgs discovery. "There's certainly a friendly rivalry, shall we say, to make sure that we're in top shape, [that] we're collecting data efficiently, that we're looking for all the different possible sorts of new physics," she says.

Tonelli believes that this internal division will play an important role in searching for the Higgs and making a discovery acceptable to the outside world. "If one of us will be able to provide the first hints of a signal, the other will be able to confirm it or disprove it. The two technologies are completely independent so it is very healthy to have this kind of internal competition."

Music for the video was provided by the UK group, the Spires.

And the excitement about an imminent Higgs discovery is shared on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean by Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall. In this recent audio interview, Randall talks about the beauty of the Higgs mechanism and the bright future of particle physics. She also shares her disappointment with the decision in the US to close the Tevatron Collider at Fermilab later this year.

Q&A
Q&A

 

Noted and quoted: on the record at the APS March Meeting

Close to 8000 researchers, educators and students converged on Dallas, Texas, last week for the March Meeting of the American Physical Society – the biggest gathering in the physics calendar bar none. If you weren't able to make it to Texas, however, all is not lost. Just press "play" on our March Meeting video report for the headline take from some of the movers and shakers shaping the collective conversation at the Dallas Convention Center.

The video runs to around 14 minutes, so you can use the time codes below if you'd prefer to browse by interviewee or subject.

Kathleen Amm

Kathleen Amm (GE Global Research) on industrial applications of superconductivity. Start time: 00:41

Walt de Heer

Walt de Heer (Georgia Institute of Technology) on graphene-based electronics. Start time: 01:37

Richard Wiener and Daniel Abrams

Richard Wiener (Research Corporation for Science Advancement) and Daniel Abrams (Northwestern University) on modelling the decline of religion. Start time: 02:30

Barbara Jacak

Barbara Jacak (Stonybrook University) on quark-gluon plasmas. Start time: 03:51

Linda Young

Linda Young (Argonne National Laboratory) on X-ray lasers. Start time: 05:31

Vasav Sahni

Vasav Sahni (University of Akron) on spider adhesives. Start time: 07:17

Jeremy O'Brien

Jeremy O'Brien (University of Bristol) on integrated quantum photonics. Start time: 08:53

Shoucheng Zhang

Shoucheng Zhang (Stanford University) on topological insulators and their applications. Start time: 10:36

Joseph Stroscio

Joseph Stroscio (NIST) on SPM studies of graphene. Start time: 12:50

Finally, be sure to check back next month for more March Meeting videos, including a series of exclusive reports celebrating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of superconductivity and the 25th anniversary of high-temperature superconductivity.

Physicists put a new twist on graphene

Physicists in the US and UK have worked out why different samples of multilayer graphene can have very different electronic properties. The answer, according to the team, lies in the relative rotation between layers and the discovery could lead to a new way of controlling the electronic properties of the material.

Graphene is a freestanding layer of carbon just one atom thick and thanks to its 2D nature has a host of unique electronic properties not seen in thicker carbon films. This includes conduction electrons that appear to travel near to the speed of light and have zero mass – so called Dirac fermions. These and other properties of graphene could make it very useful in making ultrafast electronic devices.

Theory suggests that graphene multilayers several atoms thick should not contain Dirac fermions because electron coupling between layers destroys its 2D nature. However, Dirac fermions have been spotted in some multilayers grown by depositing carbon atoms on surfaces, which has puzzled physicists.

A new angle

Now Eva Andrei and colleagues at Rutger's University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Manchester have found that the relative angular orientation between successive layers plays a key role in whether or not a multilayer contains Dirac fermions.

The team creates its multilayer samples by depositing carbon onto a nickel surface. The graphene is then lifted off the surface using chemical and studied using a transmission electron microscope to work out the relative angle between the 2D lattices of each layer.

The presence of Dirac fermions was determined using Landau level spectroscopy, whereby a magnetic field is applied to the material. This causes the electrons in each layer to adopt quantized circular orbits – or Landau levels. The energies of these levels are measured using scanning tunnelling spectroscopy and are distinct for Dirac fermions.

Rotated stacks

The team looked at samples where the orientation of graphene layers was close to the most common stacking scheme (Bernal), whereby successive layers are rotated by 60° to each other. They found that when successive layers were offset by about 22° from Bernal stacking, the electrons behaved just like Dirac fermions found in single layers. However, at much smaller rotation angles of about 4°, the velocity of the electrons had dropped to about 80% of that in a single layer.

Also involved in the research is Andre Geim of the University of Manchester, who shared the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on graphene. He speculates that the Dirac fermions are seen because the rotation breaks the spatial symmetry between the layers. This could reduce the coupling between layers, making each layer a 2D system.

A third sample was studied with a rotation angle of about 1.2° and this had no evidence of Dirac fermions.

Changing the angle at will

Andrei now plans to repeat the measurements at different twist angles. "New graphene transfer methods opened up possibilities for designing experiments in which we can change the angle at will and exploit these properties for device applications," she explained. Looking further into the future, Andrei speculates that graphene could be patterned with regions of different twist to create electronic devices.

Sankar Das Sarma of the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the research, described the work as "an important milestone in graphene research" that will encourage physicists to study various properties of twisted graphene. However, he pointed out that "much more experimental work on transport and optical properties would be necessary" before technological applications could be considered.

The work is reported in Phys. Rev. Lett. 106 126802.

Newton’s three-body problem

  • David Meyer as the elderly Sir Isaac (Menagerie Theatre Company)
  • Kate Malyon as the young Isack (Menagerie Theatre Company)
  • William Finkenrath as Newton (Menagerie Theatre Company)
  • Three Newtons for the price of one ticket (Menagerie Theatre Company)
  • William Finkenrath as Newton (left) and Kate Malyon as the young Isack (Menagerie Theatre Company)

« previous | next »

Putting Isaac Newton on stage is a tricky task. More than any other member of the physics pantheon, the father of gravitation was a difficult, unpleasant man. He had few friends, none of them close, and no family life to speak of. Most of his writing deals with religion or alchemy, not science, and even his major scientific works are frequently couched in abstruse language (try reading the Principia sometime). And for what it's worth, Newton would have hated being in a play: he never attended the theatre, and his only recorded visit to the opera ended when he ran away during the third act.

In Let Newton Be! the playwright Craig Baxter brilliantly evades most of these pitfalls. Newton was antisocial by nature, for example, but drama requires that he have someone to talk to onstage. Baxter's ingenious solution is to populate his play with three different versions of Newton: Isack, a bookish young misfit; Newton, an ambitious, untidy scholar; and Sir Isaac, an elder statesman who takes equal pleasure in prosecuting counterfeiters and persecuting rivals. These three versions of Newton interact throughout the play – contradicting, arguing and agreeing with each other in turn.

As the play opens, all three Newtons are struggling to understand the motion of three objects under mutual gravitational attraction. Or maybe they are struggling with the idea of the Holy Trinity. Initially, it is hard to tell the difference. This is partly deliberate: Let Newton Be! was commissioned by the Cambridge-based Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, and the links between Newton's scientific work and his religious views are a major theme.

Newton speaks for himself

However, some confusion also stems from the dialogue itself, which Baxter has drawn from the writing of Newton and his contemporaries. On balance, the decision to use Newton's own words is a good one. The play's title is taken from Alexander Pope's famous epitaph ("Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light"), but so much has been written about Newton that it could almost be a plea – let the man speak for himself!

Still, there are challenges in crafting a play from Newton's original words. Newton was many things, but a great communicator he was not. Following his ideas in their raw form is a difficult task, especially since the audience must also adapt to the unfamiliar cadence and terminology of 17th century written English. Worse, Newton was famously humourless: his letters are not witty, and he reportedly laughed only once in his entire life. Finally, despite the remarkable quantity of Newtonalia – some four million words of his published and private writing survive – there are some gaps in his life, notably his mysterious breakdown in 1693.

Part of the solution to these challenges comes from Baxter, who occasionally puts the words of early Newton biographers into the mouth of Sir Isaac, allowing him to narrate and comment on various events. The remainder is up to the director, Patrick Morris, and the three actors playing Newton, who must supply the humour and understanding that the original did not.

In the performance I saw at the Royal Society in London on 28 March, they did this with great aplomb. Kate Malyon as the young Isack and William Finkenrath as Newton poured considerable energy into their respective roles, while David Meyer was suitably grave and aloof as the elder Sir Isaac. All three occasionally play minor characters too, with Finkenrath's bewigged and German-accented stint as Newton's rival Leibniz forming a highlight of the play's second half. The exchange between Sir Isaac, Finkenrath as Leibniz and Malyon as Newton's disciple Samuel Clarke also provides a hint of humour: when Leibniz dies before he can rebut Clarke's latest argument, a straight-faced Sir Isaac observes with satisfaction that this ended the dispute!

Entertainment vs education

Following the performance at the Royal Society, which concluded the play's UK run, Let Newton Be! is set to tour Canada and the US during the second half of April (click here for more info). As in the UK, most performances will be at universities. This has its advantages, but it does suggest that the play is meant to be "educational" rather than entertaining. This is a two-fold mistake. First, any audience member not already familiar with Newton's science before the play will probably find it even more baffling afterwards. Shorn of explanatory diagrams and delivered at spoken-word speed, Newton's thoughts on gravitation, optics and calculus tend to wash over listeners rather than entering their brains.

The second mistake, though, is to assume that since the play has an educational component, it is not entertaining enough for a general audience. Nothing could be further from the truth. While Let Newton Be! may not explain Newton's science, it does an astoundingly good job of explaining Newton himself, revealing him as a fascinating, multidimensional character who struggles with the big questions of his day. Michael Frayn's Copenhagen did much the same for Heisenberg and Bohr, and played to audiences of thousands in the West End and Broadway a decade ago. Why should Newton be restricted to small platforms in learned societies?

Earth grew from ‘candy floss’ rocks

The earliest rocks in the solar system, from which the terrestrial planets were born, were more like candy floss than hard rock, according to a new analysis carried out by a team including researchers in the UK and Australia. This is the first geological evidence to support the idea that the first solid material in the solar system was extremely porous before it was subsequently compacted into larger bodies, which become the planets we know today.

To get an idea of the type of primitive material that surrounded our young Sun, astrogeologists often look to the belt of asteroids that orbits between the paths of Mars and Jupiter – objects that did not coalesce into planets. These asteroids provide us with meteorites, including a class of rocks known as carbonaceous chondrites, which contain well-preserved material from the early solar system.

While geologists have scrutinized many of the chondrites that have fallen to Earth as meteorites, they have found it difficult to probe the internal structures because the grains are so fine. "With terrestrial rocks – like slate or sandstone – we can often see textures with the naked eye. But we can't do that with the sub-micron material found in meteorites" says Philip Bland, one of the researchers at Imperial College, London.

Mexican fireball

To take a closer look at this grain structure, Bland and his colleagues analysed a sample from the Allende meteorite, which fell to Mexico in 1969, the largest carbonaceous chondrite ever discovered on Earth. They used a relatively new technique used widely in materials science known as electron back-scatter diffraction, which enabled them to resolve features of the grains' structures down to 0.3 µm in size.

Then, from these images, Bland's team invented a new method for quantifying the amount of compression that the rock has experienced throughout its lifetime in order to deduce its original structure. In the case of the meteorite sample, observing a "strong" internal fabric suggests that the rock was highly porous to begin with before its grains compressed into a highly ordered state. Using the method, the team found that the sample from the Allende meteorite used to be mostly empty space, with an initial porosity of 70–80%.

To explain what he means by fabric strength, Bland uses the analogy of a builder laying a batch of tiles. "If the tiles are laid out flat and well aligned we would say that they have a strong fabric. But if they are simply tossed randomly into a patch of mud then they would have a weak or non-existent fabric."

Planets grow from turbulent beginnings

Artist's impression of a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star
Turbulent disc

The finding that this primitive rock had a very high original porosity matches well with recent computer models that predict that the seeds of planets (planetisimals) in the early solar system emerged from turbulence in the disc of dust that surrounded the young Sun. "Everyone is still struggling to understand planetesimal formation," says William Bottke, an asteroid researcher at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Bottke believes these new findings support the idea that the seeds for planets emerged due to gravitational instabilities in the protoplanetary disc. "Once the planetesimals were made, a few would undergo runaway accretion to make protoplanets. The leftovers would become the asteroids and comets."

Bland now intends to carry out further tests alongside his colleagues at the University of Liverpool and the Natural History Museum in the UK, and Curtin University and CSIRO in Australia. He hopes they can uncover further details about the features involved in planet growth including the process of runaway accretion.

These findings are reported in Nature Geoscience.

Knocking on the Higgs’ door

Based at Harvard University, Lisa Randall is a leading theoretical physicist working in particle physics and cosmology. Included in TIME magazine's 2007 list of "100 most influential people", Randall is also involved in a variety of art-science collaborations from writing an opera libretto to curating an art exhibit for the Los Angeles Arts Association.

In an exclusive audio interview (below), Michael Banks met up with Randall to talk about the future of particle physics and what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN may uncover. The 48-year-old has been vocal about the recent decision to close the Tevatron collider at Fermilab later this year. It was proposed that the accelerator would continue for another three years in the search for the Higgs boson but it will now close by October 2011 to make way for experiments in neutrino and muon physics. "I was trying to push them to keep it running," says Randall. "[Researchers at Fermilab] would have had something significant to say about the search for the Higgs boson."

However, Randall is looking forward to the wealth of results – and new physics – that the LHC will be delivering now that the experiment is finally getting going and is also putting the finishes touches to her next book – Knocking on Heaven's Door. The book is expected to be published in the autumn and Randall will no doubt be hoping it is a similar success to her 2005 hit tome Warped Passages.

Q&A
Q&A

 

Picturing Kepler's impressive hoard of planet discoveries

rsz_img_2032.jpg
Courtesy: Jason Rowe/Kepler Mission/NASA

By James Dacey

Since it was launched just over two years ago, NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 1235 planet candidates, including the recent hoard of six planets orbiting the same star. Pretty impressive, since before NASA's planet hunter took to the skies we knew of just 330 planets most of which were solitary gas giants.

Today, NASA's astronomy picture of the day is an attempt to visualize this glut of exoplanets and the range of different stars they orbit. The intriguing image, created by Jason Rowe from the Kepler science team, shows all 1235 candidate planets in transit with their parent stars ordered by size from top left to bottom right.

The Kepler telescope looks for slight dimming in the light of a star as a planet sweeps across our line of vision from Earth. In Rowe's depiction, these transits are seen as silhouettes on the stellar discs, which reflect the true relative scales of the planets to their suns. Some dots are particularly small but you can get a clearer view if you click through to the original image.

Superconductivity from nowhere

In just over a week scientists will celebrate the centenary of superconductivity: the discovery, in 1911, that some materials cooled towards absolute zero allow electric charge to flow without resistance. But now one physicist believes superconductivity can appear when there is no material at all.

According to Maxim Chernodub of the Université François-Rabelais Tours in France, superconductivity can appear – provided there is a very strong magnetic field – in the vacuum of empty space. If Chernodub is correct, the phenomenon could explain the origin of the extensive magnetic-field patterns seen in the cosmos. "This suggested vacuum superconductivity is very unusual," he says. "It has a few crazy properties that do not exist in 'normal' superconductors."

In normal superconductors, charge flows without resistance because all the charge carriers – that is, the electrons – "condense" into the same state. Physicists explain this behaviour with so-called BCS theory, which describes how electrons move through the superconductor's crystal lattice. When one electron moves, it distorts the lattice, attracting positive charge. The next electron is then attracted to this positive charge, and so becomes paired with the first electron. Together, all the paired electrons form a condensate that moves as a single entity.

Scientists have done a good job of explaining the physics of normal superconductors, like lead, which must be cooled close to absolute zero in low magnetic fields. But there are also superconductors that exist at relatively high temperatures of 30 K or more, and for these physicists are still working on a proper explanation.

The strangest yet?

In a paper soon to appear in Physical Review Letters, however, Chernodub contemplates a type of superconductivity that might be the strangest yet. Unlike previously known superconductivity, it would survive at very high temperatures, perhaps billions of degrees. It would also exist alongside strong magnetic fields and, perhaps strangest of all, it wouldn't need a material to exist – just a vacuum.

How can superconductivity arise from nowhere, when apparently there aren't even any charge carriers? In fact, even the purest vacuum contains charge carriers. According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum is a soup of "virtual" particles that momentarily pop into existence, such as quarks and antiquarks. An up quark and a down antiquark can bind to form a positively charged rho meson, but the meson is normally so unstable that it decays.

Chernodub thinks that in a strong magnetic field the quarks would be forced to move only along the field lines – and this would make the rho mesons far more stable. In addition, the rho meson's own spin would interact with the external magnetic field, lowering the particle's effective mass to zero so that it can move freely, as in a superconductor. Chernodub's calculations, which are based on a well-known model in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), suggest the external magnetic field required for this superconductivity must be at least 1016  T.

A very strong field

That's a very strong field. The best magnets on Earth – which, perhaps ironically, use superconducting coils – can achieve fields approaching only 30 T, while the most magnetized objects in space, which are a type of neutron star known as a magnetar, probably reach fields of a mere 1010 T.

Yet Chernodub believes proof of his prediction could be found close to home at the Large Hardon Collider (LHC) based at Geneva, or the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Last November the first lead ions collided at the LHC. Because such ions are moving, they create magnetic fields, and Chernodub thinks that a "near miss" between two of them might – for perhaps just one yoctosecond (10–24 s) – generate a field at almost the required 1016 T. If vacuum superconductivity does arise at the LHC or the RHIC, he expects it would leave a trace of charged rho mesons.

"How realistic this is, I cannot really tell at the moment," says Igor Shovkovy, an expert in QCD at Arizona State University in the US. "One of the complications in high-energy collisions is a very short duration of the magnetic fields generated by the passing ions or protons. The other is the difficulty of extracting unambiguous signals that would single out this phenomenon from among others."

'Interesting idea'

Volodya Miransky, a particle physicist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, calls Chernodub's prediction an "interesting idea" but adds that "the question whether one can observe this effect is open, I think, and this possibility deserves to be studied".

Vacuum superconductivity might not always need particle accelerators, however. Chernodub thinks the early universe might have had sufficiently strong magnetic fields, and that the subsequent super-currents might have seeded the mysterious large-scale magnetic fields seen across the universe today. "It sounds like a crazy idea, but what if it is true?" he says.

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