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Best of the blog

Jacko spotted in droplet, claims physicist

First it was the face of the Beatles’ legendary drummer Ringo Starr mysteriously appearing in a bouncing water droplet in late 2009. Then in early January David Fairhurst, a physicist at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, wrote to us claiming to have spotted the face of Michael Jackson in a droplet of polymer solution – the kind of substance you might find in the ink cartridges of your printer.

As the solution began to crystallize, Fairhurst noticed that a tiny droplet on the surface appeared to have a tiny human face. “I noticed it immediately and showed it to the other guys – we had a really good laugh about it,” Fairhurst told physicsworld.com. I think we will let you decide whether the droplet resembles the King of Pop.

That’s hella signatures

“Yotta” (1024), “zeta” (1021), “exa” (1018) and “peta” (1015) could now be joined by the “hella”, if a physics student from University of California, Davis, gets his way. Austin Sendek started a petition on the social-networking site Facebook early this year to establish a new, scientifically accepted prefix for 1027. Yotta, which was established in 2001, is currently the largest number enshrined in the International System of Units (SI).

“Hella” comes from Californian slang for “very” or “a lot of” and Sendek says that by accepting the term, the SI system could “not only rectify its failing prefix system but also honour the scientific progress of northern California”. Almost 64,000 people have become “fans” on its Facebook page. Sendek claims that the hella could be applied in many “crucial calculations”, including the power of the Sun (0.3 hellawatts) or the number of atoms in a large sample (6.02 hella-atoms in 120 kg of carbon-12). Suggestions by physicsworld.com readers for the prefix 1027 included the holla, hello or hilli. Could you do any better?

Spot the difference

It’s end of the year quiz time. Which of the following two titles is from a real physics paper and which is made up? “The Alpha-prime stretched horizon in the heterotic string” and “The partial solution of heterotic strings deformed by Wilson lines”. Tricky, eh? These are taken from a website called snarXiv created by David Simmons-Duffin, a PhD student in high-energy physics at Harvard University, which includes a game where you have to spot the real paper title from one that has been randomly generated by taking into account the latest trends in high-energy physics.

Depending on how well you can spot the real paper, the website ranks your score as “undergraduate”, “worse than a monkey” or, if you are good, “Nobel-prize winner”. However, Simmons-Duffin claims that snarXiv does serve some purpose, for example noting that if you are a postdoc, then you can keep reloading the webpage “until you find something to work on”. By the way, the former was the real paper.

Dad rockers riff on graphene

This year we were strangely compelled to watch this reworking of that classic-rock anthem “Cocaine” by a bunch of physicists at Georgia Tech in honour of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics, which was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their isolation of graphene – the one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice.

The tune – played by Mike Duffee on guitar and a smoky vocal by engineering professor Paul Neitzel – plays over what looks like a selection of Andre Geim’s PowerPoint slides. Highlights of the verses include: “If you got bad gates and need quantum states…graphene” and “Don’t forget Dirac, straight bands are a fact…graphene”. And who could forget the chorus: “She goes fast, she goes fast…graphene”.

Spirits are high for superconductivity research

A couple of pints at your local boozer this Christmas can do wonders for getting those creative juices going. But researchers in Japan went one step further by trying to grow a new type of superconductor in a series of alcoholic drinks such as red wine, beer, whisky and sh_ch_ (arXiv:1008.0666).

They began with samples of FeTe0.8S0.2, which were then put into 20 ml glass bottles containing different alcoholic beverages. The researchers found that with the sample in an ethanol-water mixture, only about 10% of the material was superconducting below 6 K.

But when it was dunked into alcoholic drinks, the superconducting fraction of the sample increased. Red wine was found to work best, with 63% of the sample exhibiting superconductivity as well as giving a small increase in the superconducting temperature of 7.8 K. Why this happens is unclear, but the bigger question is where the scientists got the idea for this research in the first place.

It’s all relative

 

Einstein with his dog friend Hannah
Einstein with his dog friend Hannah

Say hello to Einstein, the world’s smallest horse. He is a pinto stallion, born in March weighing just 2.7 kg, and is only 35 cm tall. So why is a small horse named after the world’s most famous physicist? “We thought the name was befitting of him because he had such a huge head for such a little foal,” Einstein’s owners Charlie Cantrell and Rachel Wagner from New Hampshire, US, told physicsworld.com.

They also named the horse Einstein because they felt it would be a reminder of two things. The first was that “one has to be intelligent when purchasing a miniature horse [as] they require a massive amount of specialized care”. The second was that “Einstein believed in compassion for all living creatures. He was an advocate of humane treatment of animals.” Hmm.

Encryption kicks off in the quantum stadium

 

You might not think that football and quantum cryptography have much in common. But both were combined at this year’s FIFA World Cup at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, where one of the competition’s semi-finals took place on 7 July.

The eThekwini Municipality in Durban has teamed up with the Centre for Quantum Technology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) to install a quantum-cryptography-secured telecoms link between the football stadium and the FIFA 2010 World Cup Joint Operation Centre in Durban.

According to UKZN physicist Abdul Mizra, the system was used to ensure the secure transmission of voice and data, including e-mail, during the World Cup. What FIFA boss Sepp Blatter had to say that is so secret remains a mystery.

Brazilian wundergoal revisited

 

Still on football, many consider the goal scored from a free kick by Brazilian fullback Roberto Carlos against France in 1997 to be one of the best ever. When the São Paulo-born defender struck the ball about 35 m from the French goal, it was initially heading so far wide that it made a ball boy, who was standing a few metres to the right of the goal, duck. But at the last moment the ball curved strongly to the left and just snuck into the net.

Theories for this effect range from the material of the ball, the unusually dry conditions on the night to even a gust of wind. Thirteen years on, Guillaume Dupeux and colleagues at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, can finally explain the physics behind the curve (New J. Phys. 12 093004).

By firing and tracking tiny polymer spheres through water, the researchers witnessed a “spinning-ball spiral” effect where the friction exerted on a ball by its surroundings slows it down enough for the spin to take over in directing the ball’s trajectory and sending it into the goal. The research has been a big hit, with the paper downloaded 10,790 times within two days of being published. And the institution that downloaded the paper the most? Yep, you guessed it: São Paulo University.

Kenyan physics graduate builds aircraft via Wikipedia

 

After studying physics at the University of Nairobi and then moving into the computer-hardware business, Gabriel Nderitu, 42, cobbled together a two-seater aircraft this year after reading about the principles of aeronautics from that most trusted information source – Wikipedia.

Nderitu – Kenya’s answer to the Wright brothers – began constructing his craft last year and it has so far cost about $8000. Weighing in at 800 kg and built around the engine of a Toyota NZE car, the craft’s wings are made from sheets of aluminium and attached to its nose is a 188 cm propeller operating at 4000 rotations per minute.

He downloaded roughly 5 GB of data to design the craft, with Wikipedia serving as the main source of information. However, the project has attracted the attention of the Kenyan Civil Aviation Authority, which has advised Nderitu to stop working on his plane and seemingly missed the more uplifting side to the story.

By ‘eck! Particle physicist to (apparently) star in soap opera

 

Brian Cox
Brian Cox

And lastly, a story that did not quite happen. Although the article appeared on 1 April, it did, however, still take quite a few of our readers by surprise. We reported that Brian Cox, the University of Manchester particle physicist and a researcher at CERN in Geneva, was set to appear on Coronation Street – the longest-running British TV soap opera.

The show, known affectionately as Corrie, is set in the fictional town of Weatherfield, a suburb of Manchester, and follows a number of dysfunctional families living on the street with the Rovers Return pub as its main social point. Cox, who was born in Oldham, Greater Manchester, will be no stranger to the show or indeed the dialect, which can feature terms such as “eh, chuck?”, “nowt” and “by ‘eck!”

The Mancunian physicist was expected to play the character Byron Knox, a particle physicist who works at Weatherfield Polytechnic. Although details about the storyline for Cox’s character were scarce, physicsworld.com learnt that Knox used to work at CERN but returns to Weatherfield after being sacked for accidentally dropping his meat and potato pie onto an electrical connection at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – stopping the experiment from working. His appearance on the show, alas, never took place, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen next year!

You can be sure of more quirky stories from the world of physics next year. See you in 2011!

Funding the frontiers of materials science

When it comes to funding dollars, the National Science Foundation’s Division of Materials Research (DMR) is one of America’s most important backers of materials science.

Next year, this government agency will allocate close to $320 million on a wide-ranging programme of advanced materials research and technology innovation.

In this exclusive physicsworld.com video interview, Ian Robertson, the DMR’s incoming director, talks about growth areas – nanoelectronics, photovoltaics and data-enabled science among others – and what the agency is doing to encourage high-risk, high-payoff interdisciplinary research.

As for the “next big thing”, Robertson doesn’t have a crystal ball, but he does predict a pivotal role for computational materials science and simulation in areas like synthesis, processing and the modelling of next-generation materials.

“My feeling is that it is not going to impact one area of materials science, but the entire field,” says Robertson, who is also a Donald B Willett professor of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This interview forms part of a series filmed at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting in Boston. See also “Living in a material world”.

Our favourite pictures of 2010

No, that’s not a Frisbee balancing on a stalagmite – it’s an electron microscope image of the first all-optical transistor on a silicon chip. (Courtesy: EPFL.)

Topological defects
Topological defects

It could be a Hermes scarf, but it’s a photograph of topological defects created when a particle is placed in a liquid crystal. (Courtesy: Oleg Lavrentovich, Israel Lazo and Oleg Pishnyak.)

The far side of the Moon
The far side of the Moon

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been sweeping around the Moon for over a year and has delivered many spectacular pictures – including this one of the far side of the Moon. (Courtesy: NASA.)

Artist's impression of a molecular motor
A four-legged motor trots along

This one made us laugh. On the left is an artist’s impression of a four-legged molecular motor, which walks much like a horse (right). (Courtesy: Ludwig Bartels.)

Equipment analysing Leonardo's painting
Up close and personal with Leonardo’s famous muse

Why does Leonardo’s famous portrait of Mona Lisa have such natural grace? The answer could come from this X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy study at the Louvre. (Courtesy: Walter Philippe.)

ESA's first full-sky map
A clearer vision of the past

This is our best view yet of “the face of God”, taken by ESA’s Planck space mission. What will this all-sky survey of the cosmic microwave background reveal about the origin of the universe? (Courtesy: ESA.)

Nano Matterhorn
Nano Matterhorn

Making a model of the Matterhorn just 25 nm tall must rank among the oddest of follies. But that’s just what Armin Knoll and colleagues at IBM in Switzerland and the US did using their new scanning probe lithography technique. (Courtesy: IBM Research, Zurich.)

A filament at a wavelength of 304 angstroms
A filament at a wavelength of 304 angstroms

Fantastic flares and eerie light from streams of electrons are just some of the stunning scenes of the Sun captured in high resolution by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was launched in February. (Courtesy: NASA.)

Swishing iron in the Earth's liquid-iron outer core
Swishing iron in the Earth’s liquid-iron outer core

Magnetohydrodynamics may be a mouthful, but it does create stunning computer visualizations. These were made by Akira Kageyama and colleagues at the Earth Simulator supercomputer in Japan and show how molten iron could flow deep within our planet’s interior to generate the Earth’s magnetic field.

Fractal patterns enter the quantum world
Fractal patterns enter the quantum world

This scanning tunnelling microscope image is the first ever fractal pattern spotted in a quantum system. It was taken by Ali Yazdani and team at Princeton University in the US, who say that the fractal emerges when the doped gallium arsenide sample makes the transition from metal to insulator. (Courtesy: Yazdani Group, Princeton University.)

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov
Simple ingenuity

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics went to Andre Geim (left) and Kostya Novoselov of the University of Manchester. We loved this serene shot of the two graphene gurus sitting outside on a lovely autumn day – the calm before the storm of fame struck. (Courtesy: University of Manchester.)

Giant hole in Guatemala City
Giant hole opens in Guatemala

Oops! There goes the neighbourhood. This amazing 60 m “sinkhole” suddenly appeared this year in Guatemala City. Geophysicists say that such collapses can occur when liquids flow into an underground cavity causing it to corrode into a network of chambers that can no longer support the overlying rock and soil. (Courtesy: Guatemalan Government.)

Cosmic microwave background radiation
Do these concentric circles offer a glimpse of before the Big Bang?

Do these concentric circles offer a glimpse of before the Big Bang? Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyn came to this conclusion after studying images of the cosmic microwave background radiation. However, other physicists are not convinced. (Courtesy: Penrose and Gurzadyn.)

Flow field around a swimming Volvox carteri
Flow field around a swimming Volvox carteri

The oceans are full of tiny organisms like this alga. Their constant swimming plays an important, yet poorly understood, role in the transport of heat and nutrients. The colours and contours show how water flows past the moving alga. (Courtesy: K Drescher and colleagues, University of Cambridge.)

A refreshable, holographic image of an F-4 Phantom Jet
A refreshable, holographic image of an F-4 Phantom Jet

Remember that scene in Star Wars when a hologram of Princess Leia pops out of R2D2? Now, Nasser Peyghambarian and colleagues at the University of Arizona and Nitto Denko Technical Corporation have taken an important step towards creating such an animation. This is their version of an F-4 Phantom Jet. (Courtesy: gargaszphotos.com/University of Arizona.)

Living in a material world

The Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting has become a reference point for the increasingly cross-disciplinary mix of scientists and engineers that make up the materials-science community. In the first of our series of exclusive video reports from the conference, which was held in Boston earlier this month, delegates give their take from the cutting edge of materials science and technology.

Red Moon of Ontario

john moon1.jpg


By Hamish Johnston

john moon2.jpg

My old friend John Shymko has posted some lovely photos of a very red eclipsed Moon that he took early this morning in southern Ontario.

The Earth is blocking direct sunlight from reaching the Moon, which is instead illuminated by sunlight that has scattered through the Earth’s atmosphere. This is what gives the Moon its lovely red colour.

Indeed, consulting NASA’s entry on the Danjon scale I’d say that John’s Moon scores full marks at L=4. This means that John saw a full umbral eclipse.

Top 10 books for 2010

10. The Tunguska Mystery by Vladimir Rubtsov (Springer)
Some obscure, little-publicized books deserve to remain so. This isn’t one of them. True, the book’s subject matter – a massive explosion that flattened 2100 km2 of Siberian forest over a century ago – is admittedly a little arcane, but in weaving together history, science and personal narrative, Vladimir Rubtsov makes a compelling case for why the Tunguska event deserves more attention beyond the borders of the old Soviet Union.

9. Coming Climate Crisis? Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix by Claire L Parkinson (Rowman & Littlefield)
I seldom disagree with Physics World‘s reviewers, but in this case, I did. Reviewer Alan Robock objected to the fact that, although Claire Parkinson is not a climate sceptic herself, and her book discusses many flaws in sceptics’ arguments, she nevertheless treats those arguments seriously. Having read my share of ranting discussion-board posts, I admit that Robock had a point when he wrote that “when ‘sceptical’ scientists misrepresent the science on purpose…they should be condemned – not have their specious arguments accepted uncritically”. However, I also think that insults are unlikely to change minds, and that too many books about climate change (on both sides) are “preaching to the choir”. If we want a better-quality debate, Parkinson’s approach seems closer to the mark.

8. How It Ends by Chris Impey (W W Norton)
Rather than looking back to the Big Bang and trying to describe how life, the universe and everything began, Chris Impey chose to tackle the just-as-intriguing question of what happens when it ends. Impey defines “it” as everything from life on Earth (human and otherwise) to the solar system, the galaxy and the universe itself. According to our reviewer, Cormac O’Raifeartaigh, the result is a varied and surprisingly cheerful proof that “every good story needs an ending”.

7. Lake Views: This World and the Universe by Steven Weinberg (Harvard University Press)
A new book of essays from Steven Weinberg is always welcome, and our reviewer, John Ellis, was fulsome in his praise of this one. The subject matter in these essays ranges from science and philosophy to defence policy and religion. According to Ellis, each essay “dissects one of these subjects with the same logic, clarity and single-mindedness that his colleagues appreciate in Weinberg’s research papers”. If more of us could view such subjects with Weinberg’s cool rationality, Ellis adds, “our world and our public discourse would be the better for it”.

6. The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson (Crown Business)
After observing that he has “always been surprised that scientists in academia are not more curious about the lives of their former peers working in the ‘real world'”, Physics World reviewer Steve Hsu went on to recommend that anyone willing to buck the trend should read this pacy description of the “increasingly mathematical and technological world of high finance, and the many physicists, mathematicians and engineers who inhabit it”. Just don’t get too jealous of their high-flying lifestyles.

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson
Newton and the Counterfeiter

5. Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson (Faber and Faber)
We at Physics World have always argued that people with a physics background can turn their hands to a wide variety of careers. As it turns out, the financial physicists who feature in our number 6 book can claim an illustrious predecessor: at the age of 53, no less a physicist than Isaac Newton traded academic life at Cambridge for the chance to “wade hip deep into London’s underworld” as warden of the Royal Mint. Thomas Levenson’s account of this part of Isaac Newton’s career makes for compelling reading, and offers fresh insights into one of physics’ best-known figures.

4. Packing for Mars by Mary Roach (One World Publications/ W W Norton)
Ever wanted to become an astronaut? Ever considered that boldly going where few have gone before will require sacrificing a lot of privacy, accepting a lot of hazards, and spending months in a space capsule that reeks of your fellow astronauts’ farts? Roach’s eye-opening account of the smelly, uncomfortable and just plain weird side of space exploration is equal parts fascinating and hilarious. Yet even when she’s asking a Russian cosmonaut about space-borne sex substitutes, her respect for the human beings willing to take the gross with the glorious is evident. As she writes in the introduction, “Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.”

3, 2, 1…
In 2009 picking the year’s top book was easy: Graham Farmelo’s biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, stood head-and-shoulders above the rest, and won a Costa “Best Biography” gong to prove it. The competition for 2010 was tighter, with a cluster of books vying for the honour, and it was hard to decide between them. So with that caveat, here come the top three…

3. Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle by Ian Sample (Virgin Books/Basic Books)
A lot of ink has been spilled about the Higgs boson in the past few years, and the fact that we haven’t discovered the damn thing yet doesn’t seem to stem the tide one bit. But if you read just one popular-science book about the ubiquitous/elusive particle this year, let it be this one. (If you read two, pick up Gian Francesco Giudice’s The Zeptospace Odyssey as well – it fell just outside this list.) According to our reviewer Andy Parker, Ian Sample’s account “could be the screenplay” for a Hollywood film about Higgs-hunting. Yet Sample is also careful with the science, giving credit to physicists other than Peter Higgs and avoiding the lazy assumption that particle physics begins and ends with the boson that bears his name. So if you want to explain to a non-scientist what all the fuss is about, says Parker, “buy them this book, and get a copy for yourself”.

2. How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel (One World Publications/Scribner)
Richard Feynman once said that if you cannot explain something to a first-year undergraduate, you haven’t really understood it. The author of our number two book, Chad Orzel, pushes Feynman’s principle to its logical conclusion – and beyond – by attempting to explain quantum physics to Emmy, his dog. It’s a cute idea, and it works for several reasons. One is that Orzel’s explanations are unusually clear and concrete, and they incorporate graphs, diagrams and simple equations in a way that aids understanding, rather than hindering it. Another reason is that he draws many of his examples not from quantum mechanics’ 1920s “golden age”, but from modern experiments performed by living scientists. This is astonishingly (and sadly) uncommon for a quantum-physics book aimed at a popular audience. And finally, there’s Emmy. A talking dog will not be every reader’s cup of tea, but Emmy’s naïve-yet-revealing questions do allow Orzel to correct misconceptions and try out different explanations without appearing to talk down to the reader. Give the dog (and her owner) a biscuit, and give this book a try.

The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy
The Edge of Physics

1. The Edge of Physics: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Cosmology by Anil Ananthaswamy (Duckworth/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
With big unanswered questions about dark matter and dark energy dominating current research, these are exciting times for cosmology. Yet writers who want to communicate that excitement have a problem: once they’ve stated the mind-blowing fact that 96% of the universe’s mass is a near-complete mystery to us, what do they do for an encore? Ananthaswamy’s ingenious solution was to focus on cosmology’s practical side, by taking a continent-hopping tour of experiments that aim to detect cosmological mysteries like neutrinos and dark matter. The result is a book that hovers between popular physics and travelogue, as Ananthaswamy, a consultant editor of New Scientist, writes with equal eloquence about the ethereal science of neutrinos and the (literally) cold practicalities of studying them in places like Antarctica and Siberia. He’s got a good eye for detail, too, speckling his account with the sort of anecdotes – like finding 18th-century lead for dark-matter detector shields or retrieving a string of photomultiplier tubes from the bottom of the world’s deepest lake – that bring research to life. It’s a fine story, told in an innovative and exciting way – and it’s our book of the year for 2010.

Happy holiday reading!

Physics World reveals its top 10 breakthroughs for 2010

The ALPHA collaboration announced its findings in late November, which involved trapping 38 antihydrogen atoms (an antielectron orbiting an antiproton) for about 170 ms. This is long enough to measure their spectroscopic properties in detail, which the team hopes to do in 2011.

Just weeks later, the ASACUSA group at CERN announced that it had made a major breakthrough towards creating a beam of antihydrogen that is suitable for spectroscopic studies. Our congratulations to both teams.

We have also awarded nine runners-up mentions (see below) – with second place going to the first direct detection of the spectrum of an exoplanet and third place to the observation of quantum behaviour in an object big enough to be seen with the naked eye.

1st place: Antihydrogen success

The antihydrogen breakthroughs scooped our first prize because it ought now be possible to carry out the first detailed studies of the energy levels in antihydrogen. Any slight differences in the levels compared to ordinary hydrogen could shed light on one of the biggest mysteries in physics – why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

Photo of the ALPHA team
The ALPHA team celebrates

The ALPHA group is represented by Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark, who told physicsworld.com that the holy grail of antihydrogen studies is measuring the energy of the 1 s to 2 s atomic transitions. This transition in the far-ultraviolet has been measured in hydrogen to an accuracy of two parts in 1014, and making similar measurements on antihydrogen could reveal a violation of charge-parity-time reversal (CPT) symmetry. The discovery of such a violation could also help physicists understand why there is much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

One challenge facing the ALPHA team is accumulating enough antihydrogen to make accurate measurements – however, Hangst said that the team has already trapped “a lot” more than the 38 reported in November. Hangst says that the most difficult part of the five-year ALPHA project has been “learning how to make antihydrogen cold enough to trap”, because it is extremely difficult to make spectroscopic studies on beams.

Photo of some of the ASACUSA team
Some of the ASACUSA team at CERN

In December, however, the ASACUSA team announced its ability to create a focused beam of antihydrogen that the researchers believe is suitable for making spectroscopic measurements at microwave energies. This should allow them to look at the hyperfine structure of antihydrogen energy levels and compare them to hydrogen – which could provide evidence of CPT violation.

ASACUSA team leader Yasunori Yamazaki of the RIKEN laboratory in Japan told physicsworld.com that its next step is to make their “antihydrogen beam from a strong non-uniform magnetic field region where it is produced and into a microwave cavity for analyses in a magnetic-field-free region to realize high-precision spectroscopy”. He adds that the physicists are “an inch away” from extracting the beam and “several inches away” from making spectroscopic measurements. “I hope we can start to work on the spectroscopy next year after the confirmation of an antihydrogen beam,” he says.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of both projects is that there is no definitive theoretical prediction of how (or indeed if) CPT-violation will occur in the hydrogen-antihydrogen system. The antihydrogen experiments will begin again at CERN in May, so look forward to exciting results – and perhaps a few surprises from both groups.

2nd place: Exoplanet atmosphere laid bare

Second place in our list of top breakthroughs for 2010 goes to a team of astronomers in Canada and Germany who have made the first direct measurement of the atmospheric spectrum of a planet outside our solar system. Markus Janson of the University of Toronto and colleagues used the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) to study the atmosphere of the exoplanet HR 8799, which is 130 light-years from Earth. Although this particular exoplanet shows no signs of life, the ability to make such measurements is an important step forward in the search for life elsewhere in the universe.

3rd place: Quantum effects seen in a visible object

Micrograph of the resonator
Resonator

In what is an important step towards testing Schrödinger’s cat paradox, physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have bagged third place in our top 10 by observing true quantum behaviour in a macroscopic object big enough to be seen with the naked eye. Andrew Cleland and crew reduced the amplitude of the vibrations in a resonator by cooling it down to below 0.1 K. They were then able to create a superposition state of the resonator where they simultaneously had an excitation in the resonator and no excitation in the resonator. “This is analogous to Schrödinger’s cat being dead and alive at the same time,” says Cleland. This is the first time this feat has been achieved and it could shed light on the mysterious boundaries between the classical and quantum worlds.

4th place: Visible-light cloaking of large objects

Fourth place on our list is a last-minute entry and goes to two independent teams of physicists who have just published preprints claiming to have built the first invisibility cloaks that can hide large objects from visible light. Now George Barbastathis and colleagues at the Massachussets Institute of Technology and the University of Singapore report the cloaking of 2D millimeter-sized objects. Meanwhile Shuang Zhang and team at the University of Birmingham, Imperial College and the Technical University of Denmark have managed to cloak millimeter-sized 3D objects from prying eyes. Unlike most other cloaks that use artificial metamaterials, both cloaks use natural calcite crystals.

5th place: Hail the first sound lasers

Two independent groups of physicists have been jointly awarded fifth place after they unveiled the first phonon “lasers”. These emit coherent sound waves in much the same way as lasers emit coherent light waves. One team was led by Tony Kent at the University of Nottingham in the UK and the other by Ivan Grudinin at Caltech. One of the devices emits sound at about 400 GHz while the other operates in the megahertz range. As sound penetrates most materials, the lasers could be used to obtain 3D images of tiny nanostructures.

6th place: A Bose–Einstein condensate from light

Bonn physicists and their photon BEC
The first photon BEC

Many physicists believed it could not be done, but now a team in Germany has created a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) from photons, earning them the sixth slot. BECs are formed when identical bosons – particles with integer spin – are cooled until all particles are in the same quantum state. Although photons are the most common boson of them all, they are easily created or destroyed when they interact with other matter – making it very difficult to cool photons to form a condensate. But that did not deter Martin Weitz and colleagues at the University of Bonn, who got round this problem by continuously pumping the BEC with a laser to make up for lost photons. Beyond the pure chutzpah of making the BEC, the breakthrough could actually help boost the performance of solar cells.

7th place: Relativity with a human touch

Seventh place in our league table goes to physicists in the US who have shown us the human face of relativity. James Chin-Wen Chou and colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) used two of the world’s most accurate optical clocks to show that time speeds up in a clock that is hoisted a mere 33 cm above the other. They also saw time slow down in a clock moving less than about 35 km/h relative to its twin. While there’s nothing groundbreaking about the physics – Einstein’s theories of relatively are on very solid ground – it’s reassuring that its effects can be seen at human distances and speeds.

8th place: Towards a Star Wars telepresence

A refreshable, holographic image of an F-4 Phantom Jet
F-4 Phantom holograph

Anyone who uses physics to realize a scene from Star Wars deserves a place in our top 10, which is why Nasser Peyghambarian and collegues at the University of Arizona and Nitto Denko Technical Corporation come in at number eight. In 1977 audiences were wowed by the special effects in that cinematic classic, which included a hologram of Princess Leia making a distress call to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Now, Peyghambarian and team have taken a big step towards making such real-time, dynamic holograms a reality by inventing a photorefractive polymer screen that reacts very quickly to laser light.

9th place: Proton is smaller than we thought

Physicists have been making measurements of protons for more than 90 years so you would have thought its size would be settled. But this year an international team led by Randolf Pohl at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics discovered that the proton is about 4% smaller than previously thought – bagging ninth place in our list. The surprising result was obtained by studying “muonic” hydrogen in which the electron is replaced by a much heavier muon. The finding could mean that physicists need to rethink how they apply the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) – or even that the theory itself needs a major overhaul.

10th place: CERN achieves landmark collisions

Lead collisions, imaged by the ALICE detector
Lead collisions

We couldn’t have a top 10 list that does not include the significant breakthroughs in accelerator technology at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In March, LHC physicists achieved the first 7 TeV proton–proton collisions ever achieved in a particle accelerator. And what’s more, in November the LHC moved seamlessly into the business of colliding lead ions in a successful bid to recreate the conditions of just after the Big Bang. Both runs generated copious amounts of data that will keep physicists busy until the accelerator starts up again next year.

Semiconductor memory stores spins

Physicists in the US and the UK have found a way to store and read data in nuclear spins using electronic pulses. The breakthrough could help in the development of spintronic systems that process information using spins – and could also find applications in quantum computation.

Spintronics is an emerging area of solid-state physics that attempts to use the spin as well as the charge of electrons to process data more efficiently. But a problem with electron spins is that they have a fairly short lifetime, which in practice would lead to corrupt data. For this reason scientists have been looking for new and better ways to store and retrieve information from spin systems.

One place to store spin-based information is in nitrogen-vacancy defects of a diamond crystal, and in recent years this has shown some promise. But the trouble with using diamond is that it is not compatible with conventional silicon-based electronics – a must if spintronic devices are ever to be integrated into computers.

Silicon-based breakthrough

Now, Dane McCamey of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and colleagues from Florida State University, Tallahassee, and University College London have found a way to store, and read, spins in a widely used semiconductor: phosphorous doped silicon (SiP). Their work marks the first time anyone has taken an electrical readout of data held in atomic nuclei.

Researchers have previously tried to map spin information (whether a spin is pointing up or down) onto nuclei and then read it, but had little success. The answer from McCamey’s group is to polarize all the conduction electrons in the SiP so that they are all in the same spin state. The do this by cooling the material to a few degrees above absolute zero and applying a strong magnetic field of some 8.5 T. They can then send in electromagnetic pulses near terahertz frequencies (1012 Hz) to write an up or down spin onto electrons orbiting the phosphorus atoms, before sending in radio waves to transfer those spins to the nuclei.

The team found the nuclei could store the spins for about 300,000 times longer than the typical electron spin lifetime. To read the spin information, the researchers simply did the reverse process: send in radio waves to transfer the spins from the nuclei back to the electrons, and then send in a final, near-terahertz pulse, which exhibited a greater current for an up-spin than a down-spin.

Must be flexible and easy to use

“Whether the scheme develops into further applications in spin quantum computation or spin electronics would depend a lot on whether this technique is flexible and relatively easy to use by the community,” said Sankar Das Sarma, a condensed-matter theorist at the University of Maryland. “It’s too soon to tell. What I can say is that I am quite impressed by the clever electrical read out technique used by the authors here, and I hope that this has a future in spintronics.”

According to John Morton, a materials scientist at Oxford University, the difficulty of developing the researchers’ scheme into applications might depend on what the application is. The low temperatures and high magnetic fields wouldn’t fare well with conventional computers, for which spintronics is destined. However, low temperatures might be less of a problem for quantum computers – that is, computers that exploit quantum physics to perform certain calculations much faster than computers in use today.

“Because a quantum computer is able to solve problems that a classical computer cannot in any reasonable amount of time, it doesn’t matter that you need to work at five Kelvin,” Morton said. “It doesn’t matter if you have a short lifetime and you need to keep running error-correcting algorithms – because you will be able to solve something that can’t be done elsewhere.”

McCamey told physicsworld.com that his group is now planning to scale down the number of nuclei used, so that they can isolate just a single nucleus to function as a memory element.

The research is published in Science 330 1652.

X-ray vision tracks lightning bursts

Blink and you’ve missed it. Researchers in the US have captured the world’s first X-ray images of lightning, by creating a special camera that can capture radiation at 10 million frames per second. They presented their new findings at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco and they say that this new view of lightning could help to solve some of the mysteries of this spectacular natural phenomenon.

The research was carried out at the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing, located in Florida. It is one of the few sites in the world where lightning is initiated and studied under controlled conditions. By firing rockets with trailing wires into thunder clouds, scientists are able to generate electric fields that are large enough to trigger bolts of lightning, which then propagate back down towards the rocket launch tower.

Joseph Dwyer and colleagues at the Florida Institute of Technology became interested in the fact that lightning emits X-rays as it propagates through the air, a phenomenon that was only noted in the past decade. But given that X-ray sources in lightning travel through the Earth’s atmosphere at velocities approaching the speed of light, it is difficult to catch them on camera before they disappear. In addition, they cannot be imaged with standard mirrors and lenses because huge amounts of material are required to prevent X-rays and gamma rays from entering through the sides of a camera.

Tried and true method

Dwyer’s team has created a customized camera that has 30 detectors made from a combination of sodium iodide and photomultiplier tubes, each measuring 3 × 3 inch. The device, which is approximately the size of a standard refrigerator, is also equipped with a 3 inch pinhole aperture, and can record X-rays at 10 million frames per second. “This is actually a very old technique for making images, like that seen in a camera obscura,” Dwyer says.

We’re seeing lightning as Superman would see it with his X-ray vision Joseph Dwyer, Florida Institute of Technology

During July and August this year, Dwyer’s team studied four rocket-triggered lightning flashes at the Florida test site. Each flash lasted for approximately two seconds and the resulting sequences of images revealed that X-rays emerged primarily from the vicinity of the lightning tip as it propagated towards the Earth. As the lightning crashed into the control tower it also triggered large bursts of gamma radiation, which were also captured by the camera.

“For the first time we’re catching a glimpse of lightning in the X-ray emission,” says Dwyer. “We’re seeing lightning as Superman would see it with his X-ray vision”.

Dwyer hopes that the images can help to explain how bolts of lightning propagate through the air – a process that is still poorly understood. “When lightning propagates it moves in a halting manner called stepping. It will pause, then leap forward, pause, leap forward… We don’t know how or why it chooses to do this,” he says. “It is difficult to come up with models to explain this motion, since we don’t know what the basic picture is, but the images really help. They tell us where the charges are, where the high fields are and where the air is breaking down.”

Discussing bad science…Hollywood style

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Courtesy: Paramount Pictures

By James Dacey at the AGU in San Francisco

A number of strange events including bizarre weather patterns and mass migrations of birds have led people to fear that something is going seriously wrong with the Earth’s magnetic field. In the US, a brilliant though dishevelled geophysicist believes the situation is due to a slowing in the rotation of the Earth’s core, the site where the field is generated.

When the US government caught wind of these claims, they had the scientist escorted to a secret meeting location where he delivered a short lecture on the fundamentals of geomagnetism. He warned that if the field vanishes entirely, the Earth will lose its protective shield and be exposed to a torrent of lethal radiation from the Sun.

Once they were sufficiently convinced by the passionate but uncooperative scientist, the government concluded that there is only one viable solution: they will drill down to the centre of the Earth and nuke the core into moving again.

Don’t worry. This is not a serious news story.

This is the plot to The Core, the 2003 disaster film, which grossed more than $70 million at the box office. On Tuesday night, The Core‘s director, Jon Amiel was talking at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting here in San Francisco in a session about the representation of science in blockbuster films. In an entertaining presentation, Amiel discussed Hollywood’s obsession with geo disasters, from freak hurricanes to giant space rocks on collision paths with the Earth. He described how the idea of something going seriously wrong in the Earth’s interior appealed to him as another interesting spin on this theme.

After showing us some very funny clips from The Core, Amiel went on to discuss the question of whether Hollywood should try to represent science and scientists in an accurate way. Unsurprisingly, he believes that the success of a film comes from its ability to stir the emotions, and the aim of staying faithful to the science always comes second.

Amiel did, however, talk about his passion for the underlying science and all the geology he learned in making the film. “The Core articulates a good mystery story, like all great science,” he said.

Amiel was joined in the discussion by other speakers including Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the screenplay for Deep Impact, a film about a comet heading towards Earth, released in 1998. Rubin shared the same view about the importance of narrative but he believes there is no reason why film makers should shy away from including good science, so long as it is not to the detriment of the story. He described the extensive talks he carried out with geoscientists in predicting how a comet-impact with the Atlantic Ocean would trigger a tsunami that would wash away large parts of the US eastern seaboard and the low-lying areas of Europe.

“I really worked hard trying to make this film scientifically accurate,” he said. He contrasted his efforts to those of the makers of Armageddon, which was released in the same year and followed a similar plot. In this case, however, Bruce Willis is sent up to the approaching space rock to drill a bore hole and implant a nuclear device. He detonates the bomb, splitting the comet in half, and the world is saved.

Also on the panel was Sidney Perkowitz, condensed-matter physicist at Emory University in the US, who wrote this interesting article for Physics World back in 2006 about the way physicists are portrayed on screen.

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