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Home » Page 1496

Paper battery could boost energy storage

Many of the great ideas to have shaped the modern world have been communicated on paper. The beauty of this humble medium is that it can record information in such an enduring fashion. Now, paper itself is at the centre of a technological innovation that could play a part in the 21st-century quest for green-energy solutions.

The great recording power of paper, which has been refined over the centuries, results from the interaction of ink with the 3D porous structure of the fibres in the paper. In addition, well-controlled electrical charges and reactive chemicals on the surface help paper to cling onto its ink. Perhaps not surprisingly, researchers are already exploring options for applying paper to bourgeoning research fields such as flexible electronics and microfluidics.

Diverse tubes

New experiments by Yi Cui and colleagues at Stanford University in the US show that paper could also be used as a cheap and effective option for energy storage. They coated an ordinary piece of paper with a mixture of ink, single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and silver nanowires before heating to seal the coating.

SWNTs – which can be thought of as rolled-up single sheets of carbon – possess a diverse range of electronic properties that have already been utilized for simple electronic devices such as transistors. Cui and his team realized that, in addition to being highly conductive, SWNTs can also adhere well to the pores in paper due to their small diameters.

In a series of tests, the researchers showed that these two properties combine to give their sheets a resistance as low as 1 Ω for a coating that was just 500 nm thick. Moreover, they demonstrated that the material has a specific capacitance of 200 F per gram, which is maintained over 40,000 charging cycles. These electrical properties as well as the robust nature of their coated paper would make it suitable for improving the performance of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries and supercapacitors, they claim.

Flexible options

The researchers also report that electrical conductivity is maintained at the same level even when the paper is folded or rolled up into a narrow tube – a flexibility that could lead to a diverse range of applications. “If I want to paint my wall with a conducting energy-storage device, I can use a brush,” Cui says.

The researchers cite electric and hybrid cars as applications that could benefit from a flexible supercapacitor. They also predict that the biggest impact may be in the electricity grid. Excess electricity generated at night, or by renewables such as wind and solar, could be held in large-scale storage for use during periods of high demand.

This research was published in Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA.

Storing carbon dioxide in water cages

Gas storage plays an essential role in both carbon sequestration and hydrogen-fuelled cars, two of the most touted green technologies. To date, however, most proposed methods for storing gases in these applications have been dismissed as too inefficient, or impractical because of the extreme physical conditions they require. Now, new research in Europe and the US could pave the way for a promising solution that would involve locking gases away in an ice-like structure known as a “hydrate”.

Channelling vast quantities of carbon dioxide into deep underground bunkers may sound like a rather crude way of meeting international emissions targets, but many governments around the world are investing significant resources in trying to develop this technology. Indeed, Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, has recently called for carbon capture and storage (CCS) to be ready for widespread deployment within 10 years. Another technology that requires gas storage is the automobile powered by hydrogen.

Current techniques cost too much money and require too much energy to be practical for these applications.

Like (but not the same as) ice

Felix Lehmkühler at the TU Dortmund and his colleagues are exploring an alternative approach to gas storage that could solve some of these problems. They are interested in storing gas by combining it with water to form a hydrate – a solid similar to ice.

Unlike standard ice, a hydrate crystal offers cavities where other atoms or molecules can be stored and then easily released when the substance is heated. These cavities are abundant but limited in size, thus only small molecules such as hydrogen (H2) or carbon dioxide (CO2) can be guests. Researchers have long since noted the potential of hydrates for gas storage but the high pressures and low temperatures required for their formation has prevented their application.

In recent years, Lehmkühler and a number of other researcher groups have come to realize that stability of hydrates can be held at much lower pressures if other substances are added to the water cage. In particular, a hydrate holding both an organic liquid known as Tetrahydrofuran (THF) and hydrogen (H2) can remain stable at 50 bar, whereas a pure hydrogen hydrate can only remain stable when the pressure is 2000 bar.

<b>Hydrate lattice</b> small molecules can be stored in empty sites
Hydrate lattice small molecules can be stored in empty sites

Take it to the synchrotron

In this latest research, Lehmkühler and his team study the formation process of gas hydrates at the molecular level, as the fundamental science is still poorly understood.

“Despite over 150 years of hydrate research, the microscopic mechanisms of hydrate formation from the gas-aqueous-ice phases are still not clear,” says Saman Alavi, a hydrate researcher at the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences in Canada, who was not involved in this latest research.

In a series of experiments carried out at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France, they investigated the formation of THF hydrate. The intense X-ray beam provided the researchers with a tool to examine the formation of hydrates using the method of X-ray Raman scattering. What they found is that the hydrate formation process differs significantly from nucleation of standard ice. “A detailed knowledge of the hydrate formation process on molecular length scales can help tune hydrates for storage,” says Lehmkühler.

“This research provides fundamental understanding of the processes leading to hydrate formation,” says Carolyn Koh, a hydrates researcher at the Colorado School of Mines in the US. “The combination of theory, simulation, and experiment is important in advancing our understanding of hydrate nucleation, which is a key step towards the synthesis and manufacture of hydrate storage materials.

Experiments have already been performed where liquid carbon dioxide – pumped to the ocean floor – forms hydrates but it is not clear how stable these structures are due to our lack of basic understanding. What is more, changes in water temperature – e.g. due to climate change – may accelerate the hydrate breakdown and release of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Is exoplanet a ‘waterworld’?

The best evidence yet of a planet beyond our solar system that is about the same size and temperature as the Earth has been released by a team of international astronomers. Preliminary measurements of the exoplanet’s temperature, mass and radius suggest that it made almost entirely of liquid water – although it could have a small rocky core.

The exoplanet is called GJ 1214b and was spotted by David Charbonneau and colleagues at Harvard University along with researchers in the US, Denmark, Switzerland and France.

GJ 1214b circles a nearby “M dwarf” star that is much smaller than our Sun. The exoplanet is about 2.5 times the diameter of Earth and about 6.5 times Earth’s mass.

It orbits its star once every 1.6 days at a distance of about 15 stellar radii. The Earth, by contrast, is about 215 solar radii from the Sun.

Liquid planet

Together, these parameters suggest that GJ 1214b has the same density of water – and Charbonneau told physicsworld.com that it is very likely that the exoplanet is made entirely of liquid water.

The team believes that the surface temperature of the exoplanet is somewhere between 120 and 280 °C. While this is well above the boiling point of water on Earth, Charbonneau says that the higher gravitational field – and hence pressure – would ensure liquid water.

Another possibility is that the planet has a small rocky core surrounded by a massive water ocean and finally an outer atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. However, this view cannot be verified because the team has not been able to study the composition of the planet in any detail.

That would require the use of a space telescope such as Hubble to look for tiny absorption and emission lines in starlight that passes through the exoplanet’s atmosphere on its way to Earth. Charbonneau and colleagues have applied for time on Hubble and hope to do such a study next year.

Off the shelf

Although expensive instruments like Hubble will be required to learn more about GJ 1214b, the planet was in fact discovered using an array of eight “off-the-shelf” 16-inch telescopes installed at the F L Whipple Observatory on Mt Hopkins, Arizona. Dubbed the MEarth Observatory, the telescopes are robotically controlled to systematically study known M dwarf stars, which are much smaller and dimmer than the Sun.

GJ 1214b was detected by MEarth because its star’s brightness varied when measured on successive days – because some of the starlight is blocked by the exoplanet. MEarth is led by Charbonneau, who described it as a “risky thing to do”. However, it appears to be worth it because GJ 1214b was discovered just three months into the planned three-year observational run.

Fantastic stuff

Frederic Pont, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in the UK, thinks that MEarth is “a fantastic project” and that the discovery of GJ 1214b is “more convincing” than that of CoRoT 7b, which is the smallest known exoplanet.

Although GJ 1214b is larger than CoRoT 7b, it is cool enough to have liquid water – an important precursor for life. In addition, the evidence for GJ 1214b is much more conclusive than CoRoT 7b, the existence of which was based on data analysis techniques that have been questioned by some astronomers.

The research is reported in Nature.

UK physics hit by savage cuts

Savage cuts have been made to the UK’s physics research programme that will see the country withdraw from over 25 leading international projects in astronomy, nuclear physics, particle physics and space science. The cuts were announced today by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which is facing a £40m shortfall in funding. The cash crisis will see the UK pull out of the ALICE experiment at CERN, axe funding for the Boulby Mine in Cleveland, which is searching for dark matter, and withdraw from the European X-ray Free Electron Laser project at the DESY lab in Hamburg.

The STFC released details of the cuts, which will kick in over the next five years, in a document entitled Investing in the Future 2010–15. Michael Sterling, chair of the STFC, says that the programme – worth a total of £2.4bn – is “affordable, robust and sustainable” but admits that it is the result of “tough choices” and represented a “major reorganization” that would involve what the council dubs “a managed withdrawal from some areas”. The STFC now intends to hold discussions over the next few months with national and international partners, including universities, departments and project teams, on how to implement the cuts.

Projects in danger

In astronomy, the STFC will stop supporting Auger, Inverse Square Law, ROSA, the Liverpool Telescope and the UK Infra-Red Telescope. It will also close the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array regional centre and cancel funding for the Joint Institute for Very Long Baseline Interferometry in Europe. These cuts are expected to save the STFC £29m.

Nine projects in particle physics will face a loss of support from the STFC, which will save the council a total of £32m. These are the Boulby mine, the UK’s contribution to the CDF and D0 experiments at Fermilab, eEDM, Low Mass, Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS), Particle Calorimeter, Spider and plans for a UK neutrino factory.

The STFC will phase out its support for three projects in nuclear physics: the AGATA and PANDA experiments at the GSI heavy-ion lab in Darmstadt, and ALICE at CERN, saving the council a total of £12m. The only experiment in nuclear physics that will be supported is NUSTAR at the GSI.

The UK will pull out of five different space missions – Cassini, Cluster, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, Venus Express and XMM-Newton – saving the STFC £42m over five years.

The STFC also announced that it will cut the number of studentships and fellowships that it funds by 25% over the next five years. It currently funds around 250 students per year. The STFC will also reduce support for “future exploitation grants” by 10%.

Real tensions

The origin of the cuts can be traced back to December 2007 when the STFC announced that it had an £80m budget deficit for the UK government’s current spending round that lasts from 2008 to 2011. It is thought that the deficit emerged by an accounting mistake was made when the STFC was created in April 2007 from the merger of two existing councils: the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and Council (a grant-awarding body) and the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, which ran the UK’s main research facilities.

For the last two years, the STFC has lowered the deficit by cutting research programmes, reducing grants for scientists as well as taking loans from the Department of Innovation Universities and Skills (DIUS). However, over £40m still remained to be cut in the final year of the spending round. Indeed, in an unprecedented step, the STFC announced yesterday that other UK research councils have given £14m to help cover some of the grants it awards to researchers.

David Evans, head of the ALICE research group at Birmingham University, says they still have funding until 2011, but will then have to reapply for more money to keep the UK involved in the experiment. “The planned withdrawal is very disappointing,” says Evans. “ALICE is actually very inexpensive, around half a million per year, now the experiment is built, so this is a crazy decision.”

The UK has played an important role in building ALICE by constructing and operating the so-called “trigger”, which tells the detector when to be ready to start taking data. Evans says that if the STFC pulled funding immediately ALICE would not even be able to work. “The problem is that the STFC are now undermining the UK’s involvement at the Large Hadron Collider,” says Evans. “We will lose influence at CERN.”

William Gelletly, a nuclear physicist from the University of Surrey, believes that the STFC has targeted nuclear physics to bear the brunt of the cuts. He calculates that over the five years from 2011-2015, nuclear physics is being reduced by over 50%, while other subjects such as particle physics and astronomy are seeing cuts of only 5% and 10% respectively. “The problem is we are not well established yet in the STFC,” says Gelletly. “I am not sure they know why the subject is important.”

Gelletly now believes that the STFC needs urgent reforms, which could possibly take place after the general election next year. “It simply cannot survive in its current form,” says Gelletly. Indeed, in a statement by Lord Drayson, the UK’s science minister, he said there were “real tensions in having international science projects, large scientific facilities, and UK grant-giving roles within a single research council.” This he says leads to grants “being squeezed by increases in costs of the large international projects which are not solely within their control.” Drayson will now “work urgently” with Stirling to “find a better solution by the end of February 2010”.

Slowed light breaks record

Kilometre-long pulses of light have been stored for over one second in a 0.1 mm cloud of ultracold atoms – before being revived and sent on their way. This latest demonstration of light storage using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is the first to break the second barrier using ultracold atoms and has the added bonus of preserving the quantum state of the incoming pulse. The physicists in the US who carried out the experiment say that the work could play a key role in quantum information technology.

EIT is a phenomenon in which certain media that do not usually transmit light at a certain wavelength can be made transparent by applying light at a slightly different wavelength. EIT can be used to slow down a pulse of light so that it could effectively be “stored” in a medium. The first person to see EIT in an atom cloud was Stephen Harris at Stanford University in 1991, and he went on to slow light by a factor of 100 in 1995. Then in 1999, Lene Hau and team at Harvard University managed to slow light by a factor of 30 million. They used a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), which is a gas of atoms that is so cold that all the atoms settle into a coherent quantum state.

Now Hau and team have used a BEC of sodium to store light for over one second. The atoms were chosen because they have a specific configuration of three energy levels. Transitions between the two lowest levels (1 and 2) are forbidden – but transitions can occur between either 1 or 2 and the highest-energy level (3).

Interfering transitions

The experiment begins with the atoms in state 1 and illuminated with a “coupling” laser with a wavelength that matches the 2–3 transition. The pulse to be stored – called the “probe” – is then fired into the BEC. If there were no coupling laser, the pulse would be absorbed by exciting transitions from levels 1 to 3. However the coupling laser also excites transitions from levels 2 to 3 – and these two transitions interfere with each other.

When the coupling laser is switched off, this interference leaves an “imprint” of the pulse within atoms in level 2. The coupling laser is then switched back on and the level 2 atoms are excited up to level 3, before dropping down to level 1 by emitting a pulse of light at the probe wavelength. This pulse is identical to the original probe pulse – at least in principle – because its quantum nature was stored in level 2 atoms in the BEC.

The challenge for Hau and colleagues was to minimize interactions between imprint atoms and the BEC to ensure that the imprint endured for as long as possible. To do this, the team applies a magnetic field to the BEC, which causes the atoms to phase-separate according to energy state. As a result, the portion of the BEC that is storing the pulse separates from the rest of the BEC like a drop of oil moving through water.

Slowed to 25 km/h

Although this separation process involves distorting the pulse-storing BEC – and hence the nature of the revived pulse – it is completely deterministic, which means that no quantum information is lost. By doing so, the team was able to store the pulse for up to about 1.5 s, shattering the previous record of about 600 ms. Furthermore, the fidelity of the revived pulse – the ratio of output energy to input energy – was more that 100 times better than previous systems.

Another remarkable aspect of the experiment is that the probe pulse – which is about 1 km long in air – is compressed to a drop just 20 µm in length as it travels through the BEC at about 25 km/h.

One possible application for the system is a “quantum repeater”, which would allow pairs of entangled photon states to be separated by more than the 100 km or so that is now possible using optical fibres. Under this scheme, a succession of pairs of atom clouds, separated by short distance and storing entangled photons, could be manipulated and combined to extend the stored photon entanglement over long distances. This capability could be important for developing quantum cryptography systems.

Hau told physicsworld.com that the technique could be adapted to process the information contained in the pulse. For example, the drop could be split into two before revival – which would create two entangled pulses of light. Another option, according to Hau, is that only one of the drops is revived – creating a pulse of light that is entangled with the remaining atoms. Another possibility is the creation of “squeezed” light pulses, in which the number of photons in the pulse is set by the number of atoms in the BEC.

According to Hau, the storage time could be increased to as long as 5 s by boosting the stability of the magnetic field used to separate the BEC. However, she also points out that the lifetime is ultimately limited by the tendency of the atoms to join together to form metallic molecules.

The work is reported in Physical Review Letters.

The A to Z of the AB effect

Solenoid_large.png
Electrons (blue) passing either side of a current-carrying solenoid shows the Aharonov-Bohm effect in action (Courtesy Physics Today)

By Matin Durrani

The Aharonov-Bohm effect is one of those weird, counter-intuitive consequences of quantum mechanics that makes physics the fascinating subject it is.

Discovered 50 years ago by Yakir Aharonov and the late David Bohm at the University of Bristol in the UK, the AB effect, as it is known to insiders, is being celebrated today at a special conference at Bristol.

In case you weren’t aware, the AB effect describes the fact that an electrically charged particle passing through a region where both the magnetic and electric fields are zero is nevertheless affected by the electromagnetic potential in that region.

It can best be understood by considering a beam of electrons passing through two slits and then around either side of a current-carrying solenoid, as shown by the blue lines in the picture above.

Although there is no magnetic field outside the solenoid, the potential is different on the two sides, which means that the wavefunction of the electrons travelling past one side of the solenoid are phase-shifted by a different amount compared with the electrons travelling past the other.

The AB effect can be verified by allowing the electron beams to interfere: the resulting fringe patterns shift depending on whether the solenoid is on or off.

The conference, which also marks the 25th anniversary of Michael Berry’s discovery of the related “Berry phase”, has attracted a crowd of specialists from around the world, including Aharonov himself.

I went to the conference dinner at the university’s Georgian-period Goldney Hall, where guests were treated to a marvellous menu of roast asparagus with goat’s cheese mousse and Serrano ham crisps, slow-cooked rump of lamb with quince sauce, and confit of raspberries.

Spotted among the guests were Bob Chambers, who confirmed the AB effect experimentally back in 1960, former Brookhaven chairman Michael Hart and independent physicist Julian Barbour, author of The End of Time.

Today’s first lecture session back at the university’s physics department was chaired by Murray Peshkin from Argonne National Laboratory in the US, who introduced Sir Michael by saying “he is a man of few words but many syllables – so listen carefully”.

Berry’s lecture was entitled “Semifluxon degeneracy choreography” and he duly proceded to use a fair few long-syllabled words, including “Gaussian random simulation”, “traceless real symmetric 2×2 matrices” and “rearrangements of nodal domains”.

The talk was a bit over my head, but on such occasions I take comfort in Richard Feynman’s famous phrase that “nobody really understands quantum mechanics”.

The conference ends today.

NASA launches sky surveyor

WISE
WISE eyes in the sky

An infrared space telescope that will map the sky in the finest detail yet has successfully launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a Delta II rocket. NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) will probe the coolest stars in the universe and the structure of galaxies at four wavelengths between 3 and 25 µm.

Costing $320m, WISE will circle the Earth’s poles at an altitude of 525 km, scanning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months. The mission, which is expected to be 1000 times more sensitive than current infrared space probes, will take over 1.5 million images in total, covering almost 99% of the sky.

As WISE is designed to detect infrared radiation from cool objects, the telescope and detectors will be chilled to 12 K with liquid helium. As well as studying stars that are cooler and dimmer than the Sun, WISE will also measure the diameters of more than 100,000 asteroids.

WISE eyes

“The eyes of WISE are a vast improvement over those of past infrared surveys,” says Edward Wright, the principal investigator for the mission at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We will find millions of objects that have never been seen before.”

NASA’s craft will join two existing infrared missions in space: NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Herschel telescope. Researchers will now spend the next month calibrating the instrument.

Solar cell grabs hot electrons

Physicists in the US say that they have taken an important step forward in the race to build solar cells that are both cheap and highly efficient. They have managed for the first time to tap some of the excess energy of high-frequency photons impinging on a thin film of silicon. The breakthrough could lead to a new kind of efficient cell within the next three years, claim the researchers.

Most of today’s commercial solar cells are “first-generation” devices made from single crystals of silicon. These convert up to 18% of the incident solar power into electrical power, but this power is still far more expensive than that from fossil fuels because of the huge costs involved in purifying, crystallizing and sawing the single silicon wafers. Second-generation cells aim to close this cost gap by using thin films of silicon or compound semiconductors mounted on glass substrates but these cells suffer from structural defects that make them relatively inefficient.

Krzysztof Kempa and colleagues at Boston College in the US have now demonstrated a technique for creating solar cells that could take the technology into its third generation. They say they can generate more energy than is possible with conventional cells by exploiting the fact that solar radiation consists of a range of wavelengths. In their demonstration, electrons are removed from the conduction band before they have a chance to drop down and therefore “cool” significantly.

Updating the standard

At its core, the idea is a simple one – by building a thinner cell, the electrons traversing it have less time to cool down. The researchers used the standard industry technique to deposit thin films of p-type silicon (which has an excess of holes), undoped silicon and n-type silicon (excess of electrons) onto a glass substrate. But whereas the p and n layers in standard amorphous silicon cells are usually about 20 nm thick, in this case they were just 5 nm thick. The undoped layer, rather than being 300 or 400 nm thick, was instead as thin as 5 nm.

The reason that researchers have dismissed the idea of ultra-thin solar cells in the past is that, being so thin, the devices can only trap a small fraction of the photons that strike and then pass through it. Indeed, Kempa and colleagues measured the efficiency of their device to be just 3%. According to the researchers, however, the important result is that their cell generates higher output voltages.

The team built cells with a range of thicknesses and then exposed each of them to both green light and blue light. As hoped, they found that the very thin cells generated a greater voltage at blue wavelengths than they did at green, which, they say, is proof that the cells were able to harvest at least some of the excess energy of the hot electrons. Additionally, they found that the thinnest cells also generate more current, due to their much greater electric fields (which are inversely proportional to thickness for a given voltage).

Escaping electrons

The challenge now, says Naughton, is to make a cell that is “optically thick as well as being electrically thin.” They believe this could be done by making a cell from an array of wires, each of which is a few microns long and coated with a layer of amorphous silicon just a few nanometres thick. The idea is that the length of each wire determines how much light the cell collects while the thickness of the coating determines how quickly, and therefore with what voltage, electrons can escape.

Kempa, Naughton and their colleague Zhifeng Ren have set up a company called Solasta to commercialize their technology, hoping to ultimately build cheap cells that are between 20 and 30% efficient. In the meantime, says Michael Naughton, Solasta aims to produce “a highly competitive” solar cell by 2012.

Martin Green of the University of New South Wales in Australia agrees that solar cells taking advantage of hot electrons are an exciting prospect. Indeed, he thinks they could potentially be twice as efficient as conventional cells. However, he doubts that the results in the current work are really due to hot electrons of the type needed for such highly efficient devices, since, he says, there are many effects that would produce the observed dependence of voltage on incident light wavelength. “The results are nonetheless interesting and may stimulate more effort in this area,” he adds.

The research is reported online in Applied Physics Letters.

Pakistani astronomers shine a light on the skies

As the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) draws to a close, hundreds of organizations around the world can look back on a hugely successful last 12 months celebrating our understanding of the universe. There have been events all over the globe, including in Pakistan, where the Khwarizmi Science Society (KSS) – one of the country’s most active grass-roots science associations – has held numerous “astrofests”, or falakyati melas, as they are known in Urdu. The astrofests are the society’s latest initiative in popularizing science and bringing modern scientific knowledge to remote and far-flung areas of the country.

The KSS, which was founded in 1997, seeks to promote science in Pakistani universities by holding seminars, workshops, field visits, conferences and panel discussions for undergraduate and research students. However, the society also recognizes that most Pakistani students entering university are not adequately prepared for the rigours of advanced physics. Without doubt, the country needs a massive overhaul of the way science and physics are taught in primary and secondary schools: the current approach is based largely on textbooks, with little or no emphasis on real scientific activity.

It was in an attempt to promote science in schools and among the general population that the KSS decided to take part in the IYA2009. Our idea was to build a roving observatory and use astronomy as a means of promoting science education in distant and rural schools by showing students – and, just as importantly, their teachers – that science can indeed mesmerize and inspire. It was an approach that proved a real success.

Seeing the Moon

One evening in April, for example, we held a live astronomical observation of the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus at the Okara District Public School and College in the Punjab, which drew over 2000 men, women and children to an event that was transformed into a festive carnival by the school headmaster. To bring these heavenly bodies “live” to our enthralled audience, we simply connected our 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain Celestron telescope’s eyepiece to a high-resolution CCD camera and projected the resulting images onto multimedia screens.

While the astronomers – led by Umair Asim, an astronomer by passion and school teacher by profession – were setting up their equipment, Okara’s headmaster Mazhar Hussain arranged an impromptu competition in which attendees were invited to recall verses from Urdu literature about the Moon, which is a popular poetic icon and used as a simile for the beloved.

Once their gear was up and running, the audience were delighted at what they saw, although the lunar craters surprised many who were used to the Moon’s established literary image! The magnificent rings of Saturn certainly grabbed everyone’s attention and older people were particularly delighted as they were shown various stellar constellations that matched their horoscopes.

Modern and ancient
Modern and ancient

Similar melas have also been arranged in Lahore’s Punjab University and at a large school in Phoolnagar, some 70 km from the provincial capital Lahore. These events have attracted several thousand schoolchildren and our most inspiring mela took place in September in an all-girls school in Shahdara, along the banks of the river Ravi. We have so far organized eight astrofests, travelling throughout the country with our mobile observatory, each time focusing on different celestial bodies, notably the Moon and the planets.

The response has been so overwhelming that we have now decided to extend these activities into 2010. Luckily, we have now added an optical microscope to our gear and plan to show our enthralled spectators, a glimpse of the microbial world alongside the heavenly macrocosm.

Mouths wide open

It has been a real delight seeing parents, teachers, children, housewives and toddlers, all sitting together, mouths wide open, revelling in the magnificent views of lunar shadows, craters named after Arab scientists (Albatenius, Averroes, Alberuni), the mythical Pleiades, the tilt of the Saturn rings, and Jupiter’s awe-inspiring moons. Schools have even sent out invitations to nearby schools, while in remote areas – where the internet is virtually non-existent – we use the local mosque loudspeaker to announce the festivals.

Most of our audiences will never have looked through a telescope before and we believe that even these brief moments of bliss can have a lasting impact on their thoughts, hopes and choices. In particular, we hope that our events will encourage schoolchildren to choose careers in science, astronomy and physics and are glad that many of them asked our team questions about careers in Pakistan’s space agency (SUPARCO) as well as in NASA.

We wanted to use astronomy [to show] that science can mesmerize and inspire

Perhaps the most memorable event took place on 30 May, which saw a gathering of about a thousand local residents and tourists at the historic Rohtas Fort in Jhelum, a couple of hours’ drive north of Lahore. The fort, which was completed in 1547, is a blend of Indo-Afghan architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. One of the gates inside the Fort is the Suhail Gate, named after the star bearing the same Arabic appellation (it is known as Lambda Velorum in modern catalogues). Interestingly, there is a saintly dervish with the name Suhail Bukhari who is now buried at the gate, epitomizing the confluence of science and tradition that has shaped the country.

Poetry please

Through the KSS outreach activities, we have found that physics and astronomy can be best introduced to the general public if these subjects are placed in their wider cultural and social contexts. For example, our wonderful astronomer Umair Asim freely uses the local vernacular (Punjabi) as well as Urdu in his demonstrations. Moreover, we have found that recitations of poetry during breaks in the events help to attract people who, in most cases, have refined tastes for poetry and music.

Seeing the stars
Seeing the stars

Our society’s events can also help to educate Pakistani people about science, people who are often poorly informed by the media. For example, the solar eclipse that took place on 23 July this year saw the media reporting many silly superstitions associated with such natural phenomena, such as the claim that pregnant women needed to be protected from the evil influence of an eclipse, or that an eclipse can heal the disabled.

Our society’s events can also help to educate Pakistani people about science, who are often poorly informed by the media.

In that vein, the society now plans to produce some short, simple pamphlets explaining natural phenomena such as eclipses, tides, seasons and phases of the moon for parents and children. The latter is particularly important in the context of moonsighting, which marks the start and end of the Islamic months and also the occasion of the religious Eid festivals, whose timing has now become a source of dispute in the country.

In the coming months, the Khwarizmi Science Society plans to continue its scientific festivities and falakyati melas with even greater vigour in a bid to entice and incite the minds and hearts of the astronomers and physicists of the future.

UK physicists prepare for “deep” budget cuts

Scientists have expressed concern that a leading funding council in the UK will make “deep cuts” to its research budget that could threaten fundamental physics in the country. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is expected to announce next week how it will cut over £40m from its research budget next year that some say could lead to a brain drain from the country.

In December 2007 the STFC announced that it had an £80m budget deficit for the UK government’s current spending round, known as the comprehensive spending review, which lasts from 2008 to 2011. Although the reasons for the deficit were not made clear, it is thought that an accounting mistake was made when the STFC was created in April 2007 from the merger of two existing councils: the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils.

For the last two years, the STFC has lowered the deficit by cutting research programmes, reducing grants for scientists as well as taking loans from the Department of Innovation Universities and Skills (DIUS). Now, however, the STFC still has a hole of more than £40m to plug in the final year of the spending round.

From a user point of view, STFC has serious structural problems, Andrew Fabian, Royal Astronomical Society

Over the last few months, the STFC has gone through a consultation period with scientists to prioritize the programmes it funds. However, in a letter yesterday to Paul Drayson, the UK’s science minister, Andrew Fabian, president of the Royal Astronomical Society, said that many astronomers and physicists are still frustrated by the manner in which decisions are taken by the STFC. “Whilst the STFC have improved in their consultation with the community, decisions are increasingly taken at arm’s length from us,” Fabian says. “From a user point of view, STFC has serious structural problems.”

Brain drain

As the STFC manages subscriptions to international facilities like the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva and the European Southern Observatory, some physicists think that the only aspect of its programme the STFC can cut heavily is lower-priority programmes and grants for researchers. “We are fearful that [the budget cuts] will cause serious damage to our work, both through a loss of people, expertise and instruments,” Fabian writes in this letter. “Key postdoctoral staff are likely to be lost to Europe and the United States, where funding has increased.”

I expect that the cuts will be across the board, Paul Crowther University of Sheffield

“This time it is a lot worse than what happened two years ago when the £80m deficit was announced,” says astronomer Paul Crowther from the University of Sheffield. “I expect that the cuts will be across the board.” The council of the STFC will now meet on Tuesday to discuss the decisions made by its science board last week. STFC would not comment on the cuts ahead of the public briefing due to be held on Wednesday.

New space agency

Meanwhile, yesterday, during a speech at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire, Drayson announced that the UK would set up its own space agency. Although it is yet to be named or have its own budget, the agency will replace the existing British National Space Centre by bringing together existing UK space activities currently done by six government departments and two research councils.

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