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Giant carbon-capturing funnels discovered in Southern Ocean

 

A team of scientists from the UK and Australia has shed new light on the mysterious mechanism by which the Southern Ocean sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. Winds, vast whirlpools and ocean currents interact to produce localized funnels up to 1000 km across, which plunge dissolved carbon into the deep ocean and lock it away for centuries. Critically, these processes themselves – and the Southern Ocean’s ability to affect global warming caused by human activities – could be sensitive to climate variability in as-yet-unknown ways.

Oceans represent an important global carbon sink, absorbing 25% of annual man-made CO2 emissions and helping to slow the rate of climate change. The Southern Ocean in particular is known to be a significant oceanic sink, and accounts for 40% of all carbon entering the deep oceans. And yet, until now, no-one could quite work out how the carbon gets there from the surface waters.

“We thought wind was the major player,” says lead author of the new study, Jean-Baptiste Sallée of the British Antarctic Survey. “The ocean is like an onion – in layers – and there is very little connection between the surface and deep layers,” he explains. When strong winds displace a large slab of surface water and cause it to accumulate in a specific region, the localized bloat in the surface layer gets injected downwards into the ocean’s interior. But this kind of wind action alone should have a fairly uniform effect over vast swathes of ocean – which is not what the scientists measured.

Subduction hotspots

Scrutinizing 10 years of temperature, salinity and pressure data from a fleet of 80 small robotic probes dotted around the remote Southern Ocean, the researchers discovered that surface waters are drawn down – or subducted – at a number of specific locations. This occurs due to the interplay between winds, dominant currents and circular currents known as “eddies”. “You end up with a very particular regional structure for the injection of carbon,” says Sallée, describing 1000 km-wide funnels that export carbon to the depths.

The team pinpointed five such zones in the Southern Ocean, including one off the southern tip of Chile and another to the south-west of New Zealand. Elsewhere, currents return carbon to the surface in a process known as “reventilation”, but overall, the Southern Ocean is a net carbon sink.

Carbon bottleneck

The mechanisms governing atmosphere-to-ocean carbon transfer – the mechanical mixing action of wind and waves, and biological uptake by micro-organisms in the sunlit top layer of water – are already well understood. The step that determines the rate of the oceanic uptake of carbon, according to co-author of the study, Richard Matear of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, is the physical transport of this dissolved carbon from the surface waters into the ocean interior. “Our study identifies these pathways for the first time,” he says.

Understanding these subduction pathways fully is key to predicting how climate change might alter the Southern Ocean’s carbon sequestering capabilities. Both global warming and the Antarctic ozone hole increase the temperature gradient between the equator and the pole, which intensifies the southern hemisphere winds. Climate models predict that stronger winds could stir up deep waters, especially in violent seas such as the Southern Ocean, and result in a net release of carbon back into the atmosphere.

“What we don’t know yet is the impact of climate change on eddy formation,” says Sallée. Eddies arise from oceanic instabilities caused by extreme gusts of wind, intense surface heating or cooling, or strong currents meeting uneven bottom topography, but tend to escape the granularity of even the most detailed climate models. “We can speculate that if wind increases, there will also be more eddies to counterbalance its effects,” considers Sallée. “But it’s a question we don’t know how to answer yet. And it’s a big incentive for climate models to refine their grid.”

Improving climate models

Ocean-carbon-cycle expert Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, UK, who was not involved in the study, echoes Sallée’s call for improved understanding of wind-eddy interplay. “Southern Ocean winds have increased in the past 15 years in response to the depletion of stratospheric ozone,” she explains, adding “There’s a lot of discussion right now about how [wind-induced changes] are then counterbalanced by changes in eddies.”

Because of this, today’s climate models diverge when it comes to predicting the future carbon sequestration response of the Southern Ocean. “I think this [paper] is really the first time that we have such small-scale resolution in the exchange of carbon in the ocean from observation directly,” says Le Quéré. “The natural next step will be to take climate models and see how well they’re performing spatially and [temporally]…this study can really help constrain which are the good models.”

The research is published in Nature Geoscience.

What is the Higgs boson?

In less than 100 seconds, Helen Heath explains why the Standard Model needs the Higgs boson.

The August 2012 issue of Physics World is out now

By Matin Durrani

PWAug12cover-200px.jpg

Now that the dust has settled on CERN’s historic discovery of what looks very much like a Higgs boson, why not settle back and enjoy the August 2012 issue of Physics World. In a series of special Higgs-boson-related sections, we explore the implications of the discovery, offer a selection of amusing behind-the-scenes tales about CERN’s big announcement on 4 July, while Michael Riordan looks back at how the Higgs boson was predicted and the first quarter century of experimental searches for it. The digital magazine also includes access to a fabulous new Physics World podcast, “Going where the beam is good”, about the ups and downs of a career in particle physics.

Elsewhere in the issue, Alan Watson celebrates the centenary of cosmic rays, Kevin Weatherill and Edgar Vredenbregt describe how ultracold particle beams could transform nanoscience, while Physics World columnist Robert P Crease looks back at this summer’s historic transit of Venus. Plus reviews, careers, lateral thoughts, feedback and much more.

Members of the Institute of Physics (IOP) can access the entire new issue online through the free digital version of the magazine by following this link or by downloading the Physics World app onto your iPhone or iPad or Android device, available from the App Store and Google Play, respectively.

For the record, here’s a rundown of highlights of the issue:

• CERN finds evidence for new boson – Hamish Johnston explains how attention is now being focused on finding out more about the new boson’s properties

• Japan frets over ‘Galapagos syndrome’ – With worries that Japan’s research is becoming isolated, it is hoped that new initiatives will reverse the trend, as Dennis Normile reports

• Introducing the higgson – Gordon Fraser and Michael Riordan argue that the boson discovered at CERN should be known not as the Higgs boson, but the “higgson”

• Critical point: Transit watching – Robert P Crease reports on the result of four new experiments in “historical astronomy”

• The long road to the Higgs boson – Michael Riordan looks back at how this long-sought particle was predicted and the first quarter century of experimental searches for it

• 100 years of cosmic rays – A century on from the discovery of cosmic rays, Alan Watson relates how physicists have gradually revealed the nature of these mysterious objects, and examines progress in understanding where cosmic rays come from and why they tail off at high energies

• The next coolest thing – Over the past 25 years, laser cooling and trapping have transformed experimental atomic physics. Kevin Weatherill and Edgar Vredenbregt describe how ultracold particle beams could soon do the same for nanoscience applications

• A Cold War puzzle persists – Istvan Hargittai reviews The Pontecevoro Affair: a Cold War Affair and Nuclear Physics by Simone Turchetti

• ESP and LSD on the CIA’s dime – Andrew Whitaker reviews How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser

• Making the ‘wonder material’ – Graphene is taking the world of physics by storm, with new applications cropping up almost weekly. Daniel Stolyarov describes how he and his wife, Elena Polyakova, turned the graphene boom into a business

• Once a physicist: Olaf Olafsson – Meet the executive vice-president for international and corporate strategy at Time Warner, whose fourth novel, Restoration, was published in February

• A brief geography of time – In this month’s Lateral Thoughts column, Gareth Leyshon muses on the awkwardness of Earthly calendars

If you’re not yet a member, you can join the IOP as an imember for just £15, €20 or $25 a year via this link. Being an imember gives you a full year’s access to Physics World both online and through the apps.

Standard Model Higgs signal keeps getting stronger

By Hamish Johnston

If there was any doubt in your mind that physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have found a particle best described as a Standard Model Higgs boson, two preprints uploaded yesterday by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations should put you at ease.

The preprints provide the latest analysis of the data gathered by the two experiments. While much of this information was presented at a special seminar at CERN on 4 July, the preprints do include some new information.

In particular, the statistical significance of the ATLAS result seems to have gone from 5.0σ to 5.9σ. In particle physics, anything greater than 5.0σ is considered a “discovery”. The significance of the CMS result seems to remain the same as it was on 4 July at 5.0σ.

Both experiments continue to suggest that the particle they have discovered bears a striking resemblance to a Higgs boson as described by the Standard Model of particle physics.

You can read the ATLAS preprint here and the CMS preprint is here.

Italian researchers warn of ‘worrying imprudence’ over cuts

Italian physicists have reacted with anger to proposed cuts to the country’s research funding. Particularly hard hit would be the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), which has been slated to absorb nearly half of the €120m reduction in the research ministry’s budget as outlined in a decree earlier this month.

The cuts to research are part of a broader “spending review” carried out by the government of Mario Monti to try to contain Italy’s enormous public debt, which will see spending slashed by €26bn over the next three years. The INFN stands to lose just over €9m this year – some 3.8% of its budget – and more than €24m (10%) in both 2013 and 2014. This compares with the 1.2% and 3.3% cuts that the country’s largest research organization, the National Research Council, has to contend with in 2013 and 2014, respectively, and the 0.2% and 0.6% reduction for the Italian Space Agency. These cuts come in addition to a 10% reduction in research agencies’ technical and administrative staff, in line with other civil-service bodies. The timing of the cuts came just two days after the announcement that a Higgs-boson like particle had been observed at the CERN laboratory in Geneva.

Letter to the president

INFN president Fernando Ferroni expressed his outrage at the cuts in a letter to Italian president Giorgio Napolitano, who a few days earlier had himself written to CERN’s research director Sergio Bertolucci to offer his congratulations on the Higgs discovery. Ferroni wrote that the INFN is ready to make economic “sacrifices” but that the spending review “penalizes quality and excellence”, arguing that “if Italy wants to exit the crisis with a long-term vision, science cannot be seen exclusively as an accounting problem”.

Ferroni was separately quoted by the newspaper La Repubblica as saying that the INFN had been hit hardest because it spends only 55% of its budget on wages and other non-negotiable expenses, whereas that percentage can be as high as 90% at other institutes. He estimated that the INFN’s spending on experiments – at CERN, the Gran Sasso underground laboratory and elsewhere – would therefore have to be reduced by around 30%.

Strategic consequences

Along with Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for CERN’s ATLAS experiment, and Guido Tonelli, former spokesperson of the neighbouring CMS detector, Bertolucci wrote an open letter to the media saying that if the cuts are confirmed, “the INFN would find it impossible to continue its activities effectively and to honour its national and international commitments”. They also complained that the government had not consulted the INFN in drawing up its spending review, which, they said, showed a “worrying imprudence in evaluating the strategic consequences of the cuts”.

Because the decree is still being discussed in parliament, researchers are hopeful that the government might scale back the cuts to nuclear and particle physics. Unfortunately, the Italian senate has approved the decree and it will now go back to the lower house for approval, but the specific details will not be known until the final decision is made over the next few days.

According to a source inside the research ministry, it is likely that while the total reduction in research funding will be cut as planned, research minister Francesco Profumo will decide how that total is divided up, in which case the cut to the INFN budget would “certainly be lower” than planned.

Hairy solution to making sensitive artificial skin

A team of South Korean researchers has produced a simple, highly sensitive and flexible sensor based on the intermolecular forces between “nanohairs”. The device was fabricated as a synthetic equivalent to human skin. It is capable of distinguishing and measuring pressure, as well as shear stress and torsional forces, and can be easily and economically manufactured.

Reproducing the qualities of skin in a suitable synthetic sensor has proved a challenge because there are severe design constraints on such sensors that make them highly complex to fabricate. Most significantly, the devices need to be thin and flexible enough to wrap around areas of high curvature such as fingers and toes without being damaged. This is problematic because most of the materials used in electronics, such as silicon and germanium, are, in their bulk state, hard and brittle.

Epidermal electronics

Various research groups have made progress in “epidermal electronics” using a variety of methods. John Rogers’ group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, has used a transfer-printing method to cut individual silicon chiplets to micrometre size and attach them to a flexible substrate, allowing the researchers to create wireless heart-rate monitors that stick to the skin like temporary tattoos using just Van der Waals forces. Other groups have created flexible electric circuits using carbon nanotubes or graphene. But doubts remain about whether such approaches can realistically be used to produce an affordable sensor able to measure and distinguish between different types of forces on a large area of “skin”, as the circuitry would become increasingly complex and the engineering demands ever greater.

Instead, researchers at Seoul National University (SNU), together with a colleague from Rogers’ group in Illinois, have created a simpler sensor based on piezoresistance – where changes in the electrical conductivity of a semiconductor are caused by applied mechanical stress. Their design uses two slightly separated thin layers of a flexible polymer – polymethylsiloxane (PDMS) – each covered with a very thin layer of platinum to make them conduct electricity. The team then covered the inner surface of both layers of polymer with a dense carpet of platinum-covered “nanohairs”. Van der Waals forces between the intertwined hairs cause the two layers of polymer to be drawn together like a kind of molecular Velcro. However, the hairs’ resistance to bending simultaneously acts to push them apart. The two forces balance at an equilibrium distance.

An illustration of nanohairs sensor
Nanohair carpets

Platinum tips

As the hairs are covered with platinum, they provide an electrical connection between the otherwise separate layers of polymer. Any pressure on the sensor at a particular point brings the two layers closer together, thus increasing the amount of contact between the hairs and reducing the electrical resistance. When the pressure is removed, the two layers return to their equilibrium separation and the resistance returns to normal. Shear and torsion forces also affect the membrane double layer, albeit in more complex ways. Using established engineering technology, the researchers were able to collect resistance measurements from a closely spaced 2D array of points on the sensor and use them to distinguish and measure pressure, shear and torsion.

The researchers have shown their device’s sensitivity via several demonstrations. They measured a small water droplet bouncing on a hydrophobic surface and also measured the change in the speed and intensity of a volunteer’s heartbeat after vigorous exercise using a sensor attached to the artery at their wrist. They also demonstrated the sensor’s ability to measure the spatial distribution of pressure by using an interconnected sensor network of 64 pixels and placing two ladybird beetles at separate locations on its surface, mapping their pressure displacement as the insects walked over the sensor.

Principal investigator Kahp-Yang Suh explains that the techniques used in the manufacture of the sensor are easily reproducible and are economical. “It’s very easy to replicate this hairy structure using a standard soft-lithography process,” he says, “You can easily replicate from a single silicon master by a process called replica moulding, which is well established in our field.”

John Rogers is impressed by the researchers’ design. “It represents a clever way to combine materials, mechanics and structure layouts for a class of tactile sensor technology that has exceptional performance and the ability to integrate naturally with the surface of the skin,” he says. He is sceptical, however, about the researchers’ claim to have removed the need for complex electronic circuitry. “If one is interested in real, multifunctional artificial skin, then you need a lot more and different stuff, such as different sensors, electronic amplifiers and multiplexers. The need for and benefits of active electronics do not go away,” he adds.

The research is published in Nature Materials.

Planning the world’s next collider

Lyn Evans at his desk
Lyn Evans

How will the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC affect the design of a future linear collider?

Now that it looks like we have got the Higgs at a low mass, we know the minimum energy – around 250 GeV – at which a linear collider could start to do interesting physics. However, we still need the LHC to operate at its full energy of 14 TeV to guide us towards what else we may need.

How do CLIC and the ILC stack up against each other?

CLIC and the ILC are two separate concepts. Both are designed to accelerate and smash together electrons and positrons. Although there are similarities between the two projects – especially in the detectors – there are big differences in the accelerating structures. The ILC is based on a superconducting technology, involving a series of accelerating cavities that are powered by klystrons. The technology is mature and most of the development effort on the ILC is currently focused on industrializing the technology. In terms of energy, the technology is a bit limited but if we wanted a total collision energy of 500 GeV, the ILC would be perfect. We might eventually be able to push that energy up to around 1 TeV.

So what about CLIC?

CLIC is based on completely new technology, and is still very much in the R&D stage. It has a much higher accelerating gradient and therefore could operate at higher collision energies. CLIC relies on a two-beam concept in which a “drive” beam runs in parallel with the accelerated beam – and energy is transferred from one beam to the other.

CLIC would operate at 11 GHz, whereas the ILC would run at about 1 GHz. This would give CLIC a higher accelerating gradient of 100 MV/m compared with the 31 MV/m of the ILC. This means that, for a given accelerating energy, CLIC would be considerably shorter than the ILC – or to put it another way, CLIC can go to a higher energy, up to 3 TeV, for a given length.

What needs to be done before the winning design is chosen?

An early decision to build a linear collider would imply using ILC technology since it is already mature. In the meantime, without the guarantee of an early decision, we will continue to develop CLIC technology to a level of maturity where we could compare the two options in terms of scientific capability and cost.

The plan is to bring the CLIC and ILC development teams together and give them a common direction. Both technologies will be developed in parallel for three or four years until a final decision is made about what is actually going to be built. The decision will be made in terms of physics and not politics or personal prejudices. My job is to encourage much more dialogue between the CLIC and ILC communities. I also need to ensure that we are in the position to take a collective decision, based on scientific needs about which collider design to choose – without too much emotion.

What are the main differences between a linear collider and the LHC?

A linear collider smashes leptons such as electrons and positrons, which are fundamental particles. As a result the collisions produce a relatively small number of particles. The LHC collides hadrons, which themselves are made of quarks and gluons. In the LHC we want to study the hard collisions between the fundamental components, but there are lots of other ways that protons can collide. It’s a bit like smashing two oranges together just to watch the pips collide – it is very messy. The LHC is a beautiful machine for discovery but is less good at precision measurement than a linear collider. There are also fundamental processes that only a lepton collider can address.

What do you make of suggestions that a linear collider might be built in stages?

A staged approach looks attractive in terms of keeping the initial cost down. We could start at a low energy and boost the energy by simply making the collider longer over the years – something that cannot be done with a circular collider. Somewhere around 250 GeV would be a good place to start and that would bring the cost down a lot.

Will the linear collider be built in Japan?

Japan is taking the matter very seriously. It made a big contribution to the construction of the LHC and may now be prepared to host a new international facility. There are two sites in Japan that have been financed for geological surveys and it would not surprise me if the Japanese make a proposal to build a linear collider in the next few years.

But where will the collider development effort be based?

Like the LHC it is very much an international effort. I will be based at CERN and the CLIC team is also here in Geneva with collaborating institutes mainly in Europe, but also in the US, Australia and Japan. The ILC project is dispersed all over the world. There is work going on at KEK in Japan, DESY in Germany and at several labs in the US including Fermilab and Brookhaven. There is a station at Fermilab where ILC modules are tested. The first module is there and the second one is being built. However, the funding situation in the US is very uncertain at the moment. At DESY they are building a free-electron laser using technology that is very similar to the ILC and this will be an important testbed. There is also ILC development work going on in Japan.

As for the machine you masterminded, can we expect an upgrade to the LHC beyond its 14 TeV design energy?

An upgrade to the LHC is a no-brainer – it is a beautiful machine and can do much better than its original design. An upgrade programme has to be the main effort of CERN over the next 15 years. We will definitely be increasing the energy from 8 TeV to 14 TeV after the 2013–2014 technical stop and there is also a plan to boost the LHC’s luminosity over five years, but doubling the energy to around 30 TeV would require 16 T magnets. When we started planning the LHC we couldn’t make its current 8 T magnets so it is possible that R&D could deliver the technology. However, it is important to realize that a higher-energy LHC would essentially be a new collider, whereas luminosity can be increased incrementally. Everyone agrees that the top priority for CERN is to exploit the LHC to its full potential while contributing to the worldwide effort towards the next linear collider.

Polymers help assemble complex nanofeatures

An international team of researchers has developed a new way to pattern complex 3D arrays of wires and interconnects on a microchip with the help of self-assembling block co-polymers. The technique could be used to pack more electronic components onto a memory chip – an important advance as device feature sizes continue to shrink.

The team, led by Caroline Ross and Karl Berggren of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, has shown that a block co-polymer – polystyrene-polydimethylsiloxane – can be “forced” to form a complex set of 3D patterns on a substrate surface. Block co-polymers are made of blocks of different polymerized monomers. The technique, detailed in the journal Advanced Materials, involves using a simple template comprising an array of small pillars made of silica, explains team member Amir Tavakkoli. “We have found that we can create a rich variety of microdomain morphologies on a single substrate by modifying the layout of the pillars,” he says. “One such morphology is a high-resolution square lattice of dots, but cylinders, spheres, ellipsoids and double cylinders can easily be produced too.”

Smaller the better

The spaces between features in the final patterns can be smaller than the original periodicity in the block co-polymer, Tavakkoli says. This means that the number of components that can be packed onto the sample substrate is increased. Indeed, the feature sizes that can be made in this way are very small, at about 10–20 nm. In contrast, those produced by conventional photolithography are at least 10 nm bigger. “Being able to fabricate such small structures will be important in the future because feature sizes are continuing to shrink, in accordance with Moore’s law,” he adds.

Shapes in a box

Another big advantage of the new technique is that it can produce square and rectangular structures. These shapes are the basis of most microchip layouts but are quite difficult to produce through conventional self-assembly processes. “When molecules self-assemble, they have a natural tendency to create hexagonal shapes – as in a honeycomb or an array of soap bubbles between sheets of glass. They do not naturally form squares or rectangles,” says Ross.

The MIT researchers’ fabrication technique starts with the construction of a precisely controlled pattern of nanopillars on a silicon substrate surface using high-resolution electron-beam lithography. Next, the pillars are chemically coated with a thin polystyrene “brush” layer that subsequently interacts with the block co-polymer when it is applied to the substrate surface. The co-polymer then self-assembles into a pattern that is guided by the pillars.

Repellent shapes

The process works because the template coating is arranged in such a way as to repel one of the components in the polymer. This produces a significant amount of strain in the polymer, forcing it to twist and turn. “In doing so, the polymer rearranges itself on the substrate surface into more interesting patterns,” explains Berggren.

The team says that it now plans to investigate how to remove the physical post template from the final pattern, and then transfer the pattern to the substrate. “We would then like to make some functional devices and we also want to understand and model the self-assembly process so that we can generalize this work to other block co-polymers and feature geometries,” Tavakkoli told physicsworld.com.

DIY build-a-particle kit

Self-assemblying polyhedra


By Tushna Commissariat

While the vibrant image above might, at first glance, look like a painter’s colour chart, it actually shows how different categories of polyhedral particles in a fluid would pack together as a solid. The method used to obtain the findings has been developed by Pablo Damasceno and colleagues at the University of Michigan, US, and is based on only two parameters: the shape of the particles and the number of neighbours they have in the fluid phase. What Damasceno and his team have done is run computer simulations to study how 145 different types of polyhedra pack into various structures, based on interactions driven solely by the particle shape, to come up with simple predictive criteria for the final shape that is formed. As a material’s physical properties are intrinsically dependent on its structure, understanding exactly how materials assemble and evolve is essential to designing them. The team’s calculations show that, depending on their initial shape, hard polyhedra will assemble in one of four ways: crystals, plastic crystals, liquid crystals or fully disordered structures. And these all depend only on a ratio based on the particle’s volume and surface area and on the number of neighbouring particles. In the image, the four colours depict the four assembly categories, while the shades indicate subcategories of formation. (Image courtesy of Michael Engel.) The researchers also found some abnormalities and unexpected results, with some polyhedra never assembling into any kind of structure. Take a look at the Science paper here .

Intel invests in extreme-ultraviolet lithography

The world’s biggest computer-chip maker, Intel Corporation, has signed a major agreement with Dutch lithography firm ASML Holding to collaborate on developing the next generation of technology for manufacturing semiconductor chips. Under the terms of the deal, US firm Intel will take a 15% stake in ASML for around €2.5bn and will contribute €829m towards ASML’s research and development in new lithography-based chip-manufacturing systems.

Wafer etching

Chip manufacturers currently use production systems based on deep-ultraviolet lithography, which focuses light through lenses to etch circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. While this technology is limited to wavelengths of 193 nm, ASML is developing extreme ultraviolet (EUV) production systems that use light with wavelengths of just 20 nm. ASML says the new technology will enable chip makers “to deliver smaller, faster, cheaper and lower-power devices through smaller geometries on advanced manufacturing nodes”.

Chip makers currently produce chips on 300 mm silicon wafers but ASML is developing a system that can make chips on 450 mm-diameter wafers, which the firm says would basically double the capacity of chip-making factories at only a fraction of the cost. Brian Krzanich, Intel’s chief operating officer, says the firm’s investment could result in 450 mm prototypes as early as 2015, noting that in the past transitions to bigger wafers have helped to cut costs by 30–40%.

Next-generation chips

Jörg Stephan, project manager and research co-ordinator for the Berlin-based Fraunhofer Group for Microelectronics, says that Intel’s decision to invest in ASML is a boost for near-term development of EUV technology, which some experts previously thought would not be ready for the next generation of chip-making technology. “Intel is saying it believes in this technology,” he adds. “It is really new but also really expensive. It is not something that a research institute could buy and use in the laboratory.”

ASML says it is also in discussions with Samsung and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company about a stake in the firm. If those two companies agree to participate, their stakes combined with Intel’s could total a 25% share of ASML.

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