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Tony Eastham shows off his new facilities

By Matin Durrani

I wrote yesterday about whether the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia will attract researchers to the new venture.

One thing is clear: the facilities are second to none.

Tony Eastham, KAUST’s lab director, greeted me as I stepped off the media bus into the melting heat. First stop was the visualization “cave” — basically a white, walk-in room onto which colour images are beamed by four cinema-quality projectors. Put on a pair of goggles and the cave lets you see images of, say, protein molecules to look for possible binding sites or to view 3D fly-through of archaeological sites. Although such rooms exist elsewhere, this has apparently a better resolution than any other; it can even play sound, should you wish.

As we headed down to the nanotech facilities, Eastham, who used to be based at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told me that KAUST has a whopping $1.5bn over its first five years for lab equipment. Tasty.

In one of the downstairs labs a total of 10 NMR spectrometers stood sentry, all unused so far. Then it was through a side door and down a corridor with tall doors leading off. Eastham opened one to reveal a state-of-the art electron microscope and then a second and then a third. Each boasted another microscope – five TEMs and five SEMs in all, each barely out of its packaging. Another room had a suite of confocal and Raman microscopes.

And so into the clean rooms – a total of 2000 square metres in all. All spotless so far. “KAUST,” claimed Eastham, “is the most exciting thing happening in academia anywhere in the world.”

Whether all the new toys can be used for anything useful, however, remains to be seen.

Particle feud goes public

An ongoing split within the HARP experiment at CERN in Geneva has come out into the open – with fierce differences of opinion between rival groups within the collaboration over how to analyse their data. One of the groups accuses the other of research that “violates standards of quality of work and scientific ethics on several counts”, and its leader, CERN’s Friedrich Dydak, believes this to be a reflection of a more general decline in scientific standards at the lab.

HARP was designed to investigate a major technological challenge in the construction of a possible multi-billion dollar facility known as a neutrino factory. By slamming protons into targets made of heavy nuclei such as tantalum, HARP created sub-atomic particles known as pions, which in a neutrino factory would decay into muons and then into neutrinos. The idea was to measure the rate of pion production and therefore work out how powerful a neutrino factory’s proton source would have to be in order to generate the desired neutrino flux.

HARP ran in 2001 and 2002 but severe disagreements over the quality of data analysis within the group led to a split in 2004. Some 100 members of the collaboration remained as the “official” HARP group, while the remaining 20 formed a new group under Dydak, who had been spokesman of the collaboration as a whole but was not re-elected in 2003.

A rushed job?

The focus of the dispute was the experiment’s “time projection chamber”, which measures the positions and momenta of the collision products. After being approved by the CERN management in 2000, HARP was up and running in just 17 months. Dydak says that such an experiment would typically need three or four years before it could start taking data, but that HARP’s development time was slashed because the management wanted to get the experiment out of the way in time for the lab’s headline project, the Large Hadron Collider. The result was that the projection chamber didn’t work as intended and the group had to try to compensate for its shortcomings by making painstaking corrections to the data.

Dydak’s group argued that the corrections made by the official group were inaccurate, and proposed its own data analysis. The experiment’s two primary funding agencies – the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) and CERN – set up a review board to resolve the dispute. Chaired by Lorenzo Foa of the University of Pisa, the board came down in favour of Dydak’s analysis in a report in March 2007. This position was further vindicated a few months later by CERN’s SPSC advisory committee, which said that its own review of the data “calls into question the validity of the results in recent publications” of the official HARP collaboration, and also noted that the collaboration had not fully cooperated with its investigations.

According to Dydak, the official group has overestimated the pion production rate inside the detector by about a factor of 1.5, which, he points out, would lead to the beams in an eventual neutrino factory being only two-thirds as intense as they should be. He is angry that a paper published earlier this year by the official group (arXiv: 0903.4762) was allowed onto CERN’s preprint server even though the group’s analysis had been previously discredited, and that the rebuttal by his group was not allowed onto the server (arXiv: 0909.2745). “The authors of the official group mislead the reader by avoiding any reference to relevant published work that is critical of their analysis,” Dydak told physicsworld.com. “This is unethical.”

The official HARP group said it was too busy to comment.

‘Disturbed by the statements’

However, Sergio Bertolucci, who was vice-president of the INFN at the time of the SPSC review, believes that Dydak has overstepped the mark. “I am disturbed by the statements of Dydak’s group. It is unacceptable to accuse about 100 other colleagues to be scientifically unethical. These are very respectable people.” He points out that Dydak’s paper was not allowed onto the preprint server because it did not meet one of the basic criteria for acceptance – that papers should not contain offensive or inflammatory statements. “If the statements are removed, we will be happy to publish it,” he adds.

In fact, Bertolucci, who is now director of research at CERN, believes that the Foa committee was wrong to come down so clearly in favour of Dydak’s group. He thinks that “both groups are suffering from the poor quality of the raw data,” and that “both analyses are trying to regain as much quality as possible” from the flawed experiment. He strongly believes that the differences should have been sorted out within the group, a position that is reflected in a change of policy about to be introduced by CERN. From now on, says Bertolucci, papers from experimental groups will be posted on the preprint server with CERN’s knowledge but without requiring the lab’s explicit approval. Until now CERN has generally filtered papers appearing on the server to ensure they fulfilled basic criteria of scientific quality, but Bertolucci says that will not be possible owing to the size and complexity of the collaborations involved with the Large Hadron Collider. “Why should someone arrogate to themselves the right to judge these results?” he asks.

Rules of democracy

Dydak believes this new approach is seriously flawed. “I feel extremely badly about the way that things are going here,” he says. “Science is no longer of prime importance. The rules of high-quality scientific work are being replaced by the rules of democracy. That is appropriate in politics but not in science.”

Newton's wars

By Hamish Johnston

The BBC’s Melvin Bragg can’t get enough of Isaac Newton and the great physicist’s battles with his fellow scientists.

This morning Bragg gathered a cabal of Oxbridge historians to chat about the invention of calculus — which was claimed independently by both Newton and Gottfried Leibniz and the subject of a longstanding feud between the two and their respective supporters.

Describing what Newton and Leibniz had in common, Cambridge’s Simon Schaffer began by saying they both have biscuits named after them. I don’t know which one invented calculus, but I do know which biscuit I would rather have with my afternoon coffee!

Shaffer was joined by Cambridge’s Patricia Fara and Jackie Stedall of the University of Oxford in a lively discussion about the characters of Newton and Leibniz and their contributions to calculus.

So who invented what? I came away with the impression that Newton dreamt up calculus in order to study rates of change with respect to time. Therefore his focus was on what we now call differential calculus. Leibniz, on the other hand, was interested in how space is filled — and therefore his focus was on integral calculus.

The panellists seemed to agree that Leibniz was the first to publish his work — but were quick to point out that in the 17th century this didn’t have the kudos it does today. There is also some evidence that Newton had developed his ideas of calculus long before he published them.

However, when the row broke out over who was first, Newton shouted the loudest and appears to have used his influence within the Royal Society to have himself declared the originator of calculus — at least in England.

You can listen to the programme here

Satellites find water on the Moon

There is much more water on the Moon than previously thought, according to scientists who have analysed data gathered by three different space missions. Data from one mission show that water is retained by the Moon through chemical reactions, suggesting that water may also be present below the lunar surface. Significant amounts of water on the Moon would make it much easier to sustain human colonies.

Ever since the Apollo missions brought back chunks of the Moon, scientists have been under the impression that there is very little (if any) water on our nearest neighbour. As well as being bone dry, these Moon rocks also showed no signs of ever interacting chemically with water. Later studies of the Moon’s surface yielded tantalizing hints that water could be there, but these were not conclusive.

Most of what we know about the surface of the Moon is limited to its equatorial regions. That’s where the Apollo missions landed, and it’s also where subsequent Russian robotic missions gathered samples. Far less is known about the polar regions, where frozen water may be lurking – particularly in shady craters.

Damp days

New data from NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft reveals that water and hydroxyl (water less one hydrogen atom) molecules are present just about everywhere on the surface of the moon. What’s more, the concentration of these molecules goes up and down in a daily cycle, suggesting that they are formed during the day by chemical reactions between protons in the solar wind and moon rocks. Deep Impact used its infrared spectrometer to survey the entire surface of the moon and also found that the concentrations of water and hydroxyl were highest at the north pole.

Similar evidence for such surface water has also just been found by Roger Clark of the US Geological Survey, who has analysed data gathered in 1999 by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) aboard the Cassini mission.

According to lunar expert Ian Crawford of Birbeck College London, however, the most significant of the three findings was made by Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M³) on board India’s Chandrayaan-1 satellite, which was launched 11 months ago. M³ maps the mineral content of the surface of the Moon using spectrometers covering the infrared to the ultraviolet.

Retaining water

“The M³ result shows that there are hydrated minerals on the Moon,” explained Crawford. “This shows that the water is not just frozen on the surface, it requires some interaction between rocks and water”. These interactions show that the Moon is retaining water that arrives on its surface via comets, meteorites and dust as well as the solar wind.

Crawford also believes that these three latest results suggest that there is enough water on the Moon to be useful to future lunar colonies.

We will learn even more about the Moon next week, when NASA’s LCROSS probe will crash into a shady polar crater – and hopefully kick up ice and other debris that will then be analysed.

The next big challenge for Moon scientists, according to Crawford, will be to combine the results from all these missions to gain a better understanding of water on the Moon. In particular, he points out that ice on the Moon should contain a historical record of exactly what comets deliver to terrestrial planets. This could help us understand how Earth acquired its watery environment, which is crucial for life on this planet.

Results from the three missions will be published in Science later today.

Earth’s glaciers melting at an accelerated rate

Glaciers along the margins of Antarctica and Greenland are flowing into the ocean at an ever-increasing rate due to rising sea temperatures, warn researchers in the UK.

The “dynamic thinning” of these high-latitude ice sheets has been tracked over a five-year period using lasers on board a NASA satellite and detailed in a new series of topological maps. The unprecedented resolution of the data could help physicists to develop more accurate models of the poorly understood processes involved in glacial melting.

Glaciers are like “rivers of ice” that drain water from the mountains to lower levels. Where the ice meets the sea it either melts, breaks away into the ocean as icebergs, or feeds into the ice shelf – a floating extension of the land. Under stable environmental conditions there exists a balance in which ice lost to the sea as melt is continually replaced by the falling of snow inland. However, a sudden rise in sea temperatures can cause this balance to be disturbed – the result being that coastal ice-melt is not sufficiently replaced by inland precipitation.

“We don’t really have sea-level rise projections, because we don’t understand these processes,” Richard Alley, Penn State University

Scientists estimate that melting land ice is contributing 1.8 mm of the current 3.2 mm annual sea rise. In the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) there is a worst-case scenario in which a 4 °C rise by 2090–2099 will result in an average sea-level rise of 0.26–0.59 m within the same period. The forecasted rise comes from a combination of melting ice sheets and the thermal expansion of sea waters.

Disturbing the natural balance

As the IPCC admit, however, their figures do not consider the potential of a runaway contribution from glaciers. Increasing melt along the lower part of the glacier can serve to lubricate the flow of ice into the sea and thus disturb the balance even further. The resultant “dynamic thinning” of glaciers has been tracked by using GPS and radar, but previous sensors have struggled to build a full extent of what is going on as it is difficult to resolve the faster-flowing coastal glaciers.

In this latest research, Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey and his colleagues have now mapped the entire margins of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. They achieved this in unprecedented detail by reflecting signals off the ground using lasers aboard ICESat – a NASA satellite launched in 2002. Reporting their finding in Nature, the researchers find that the dynamic thinning of glaciers now reaches all latitudes in Greenland and has intensified on many Antarctic sites.

By monitoring these regions between 2003 and 2008, the researchers found that, in Greenland, glaciers flowing faster than 100 m/yr thinned at an average rate of 0.84 m/yr; while in the Amundsen Sea embayment of Antarctica thinning was as high as 9 m/yr for some glaciers. They attribute these high speeds to the fact that dynamic thinning now occurs deep in the interior of each ice sheet. “We were surprised to see such a strong pattern of thinning glaciers across such large areas of coastline – it’s widespread and in some cases thinning extends hundreds of kilometres inland,” said Pritchard.

Breaking the ice, but a lot of mystery still remains

Pritchard cautioned that it is still too early to suggest the increasing speed of these glaciers will inevitably lead to runaway thinning. “There is still a lot of physics still to be understood,” he said. “One of the big challenges is to try and untangle the varied environmental factors that influence the rate of melting where these glaciers reach the coast.”

There are many researchers who are trying to build improved ice-flow models, and some are already trying to assimilate data from glacial surveys. Richard Alley is a climate modeller at Penn State University in the US. “We don’t really have sea-level rise projections, because we don’t understand these processes,” he said. Alley is positive about the latest research. “These are great data to assimilate, and tune models, and may provide sufficient data to allow both model building and testing”, he said.

Andrew Shepherd, an earth observation researcher at the University of Leeds in the UK agrees that it is important to achieve a better clarity on the processes involved in glacial melting. “The important issue is that we (IPCC) have yet to settle on a way to estimate the future sea-level contribution due to each mechanism, and so the jury is still out.” Shepherd feels, however, that this latest research does not offer a compete picture. “The dataset covers a relatively short period (about 5 years I think) and we know that there is no reason to expect the changes to be linear”.

Pritchard described to physicsworld.com some of the technical problems that the team experienced when gathering the data. One problem was that they could not run the laser measurements continuously. “We had to run it in bursts, which meant our data came out a bit ‘stripy’.” He hopes to avoid this problem when the team continues its research using data from ICESat II and the European Space Agency’s Cryosat, both of which will launch next year.

Buying success, Saudi style

By Matin Durrani

If you’ve read my news story and blog entry earlier today, you will have realized that I am spending a couple of days at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

The question on my lips is can the university fulfil its ambitions and become a world-leading institution, carrying out research into solar power, nanotechnology, clean water and everything else the country has its eyes on. Can it simply “buy success” by building a new university, pouring in oodles of cash, paying for lots of top-notch equipment and recruiting what are reported to be some of the world’s top scientists in their fields. (Or so I am told — I haven’t actually met any yet).

It’s a bit like Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich buying Chelsea football club and snapping up the world’s best players, the only difference being he already had a football club with a 100-year tradition to buy.

I caught up with Choon Fong Shih, KAUST’s president, shortly before the king himself was due to attend the official launch party in a vast “tent” filled with the great and the good from Saudi Arabia and beyond.

As far as Shih is concerned, failure is not an option. Speaking to me near the front of the vast indoor arena, he brushed aside suggestions that KAUST might not work. “We are free of legacies and traditional boxes”, he said, referring to the fact that the university is starting from scratch and with interdisciplinary being the key.

CERN boss Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who is on KAUST’s board of trustees, was a bit more cautious, talking to me about the “challenges” of encouraging researchers to stay beyond just a few years and of making sure that the university has good links with the rest of the country.

“But it’s a new way of doing things and this is what I like,” says Heuer.

KAUST may do good work, but can it meet the standards set by, say, Bologna, Cambridge or Oxford universities, which have taken centuries to reach the top?

This is probably a cop-out, but only time will tell. Still, it makes an interesting experiment – and if KAUST works, it may encourage other emerging nations to do likewise, which is surely a good thing.

Freak waves spotted in microwave cavity

Freak waves towering as much as 30 m above the surrounding seas have long been reported by mariners, and recent satellite studies have shown that they are more common that previously expected. Now, a team of physicists in Germany and the US has gained important insights into the possible origins of such waves by scattering microwaves in the laboratory.

The work suggests that rogue waves can emerge from linear interactions between waves – contradicting some theories, which assume that non-linear interactions are required. The team believes that its insights could be used to calculate a “freak index”, which would give the probability of encountering freak waves at specific locations in the oceans.

The experiment was inspired by a measurement made eight years ago by a group that included one of the present team – Eric Heller of Harvard University. Electrons flowing on a semiconductor sheet were seen to focus into several narrow beams, rather than scatter in random directions as had been expected. The reason, according to Lev Kaplan of Tulane University, is that random impurities in the semiconductor acted like a “bad lens”, directing the electrons (which act like waves) towards several focal points.

Random currents

Kaplan and Heller realized that random currents in the ocean could also act as bad lenses, focusing smaller waves into larger – and even freak – waves.

According to Kaplan, it would be very difficult to test the theory using water in a wave tank because such facilities are set up to study waves propagating in only one direction. Instead, they joined forces with Ruven Höhmann, Ulrich Kuhl and Hans-Jürgen Stöckmann at the University of Marburg to study the effect in microwaves.

The team in Germany injected microwaves into a cavity comprising two parallel metal plates. The distance between the plates was much less than the wavelength of the microwaves, making the waves “quasi 2D” – just like ocean waves. Scattering from random currents was simulated by placing a number of metal cones in random positions in the cavity.

Orders of magnitude more

The team monitored the microwave intensity throughout the cavity and noticed the emergence of “hot spots”, where the intensity was five or more times greater than background levels. The team counted the number of such freak waves that occurred over a finite time and discovered that they were many orders of magnitude more common than if they resulted from the random superposition of plane waves in the cavity. Random superposition had earlier been thought to govern the formation of freak waves in the ocean, which could explain why mariners and oceanographers seemed to differ on the frequency of such events.

Kaplan told physicsworld.com that the randomly-placed cones were behaving like a bad lens, which could occasionally focus the microwaves into a hot spot. The experiment is also the first to establish that freak waves can be generated via simple linear interactions between waves – the microwaves in the cavity only interact linearly. Previously, many oceanographers had believed that non-linear interactions – which become more prevalent in shallow water – were required to create freak waves.

Leonid Mezhov-Deglin of the Institute of Solid-State Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences said that the microwave experiments should be of interest to physicists studying ocean and other surface waves. However, he cautioned that much more work was needed in the characterization of rogue ocean waves before they could be simulated accurately using microwaves.

Freak index

The experiment has also allowed Kaplan and colleagues to hone their “freak index”, which defines the likelihood of encountering a rogue wave based on the average wave and current speeds and the angular spread of wave motion. This could help mariners to identify regions of the ocean where rogue waves could be a problem, but Kaplan points out that physicists will never be able to predict the formation of individual waves.

A preprint describing the work is available on arXiv.

Quantum computing at the frontier

David Wineland, a member of the NIST Ion Storage Group

By James Dacey

A few weeks back I reported new findings from a group at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) that could become a significant milestone in the quest for a practical quantum computer.

The researchers had proudly unveiled the first device (albeit a very tiny one) to perform all the steps needed for large-scale quantum processing.

Crucially, their ion-based device was able to shift data between six designated zones in the trap without losing too much of it in the process — no mean feat given the oh-so-delicate nature of quantum information.

Well, a new paper on the arXiv reveals that this ambitious NIST group have not rested on their laurels and they are already looking to scale-up their ion-based quantum computing. They report the design, fabrication, and preliminary testing of a new type of ion-trap — this time containing 150 zones.

The new trap is bedecked with a “surface-electrode” geometry, which would permit even larger scaling, they claim.

I got in touch with David Wineland, a member of the NIST team. He confirmed that the group has yet to perform any algorithms using the device but they are continuing to develop the research.

Watch this space for when they do!

KAUST: from vision to reality

A new ivory tower in Saudi Arabia

By Matin Durrani

It’s at least an hour’s drive north of Jeddah along a dusty and baking hot six-lane highway to get to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which Saudi Arabia hopes will soon become one of the world’s leading research institutions.

The question, though, is will researchers be tempted to the shores of the Red Sea and turn KAUST into what its proponents envisage? Why give up a respectable career path in, say, the US or Europe to join a new university with no track record in a country that, in recent times, is not exactly a power house on the world research stage?

That’s the question I hope to answer while here at KAUST over the next two days.

Of course, there’s the money: KAUST comes with an endowment of $10bn, which is not to be sniffed at. The salaries are sure to be good.

Then there are the spanking-new research facilities, which include a nanotech lab, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, and a visualization unit.

KAUST also intends to be interdisciplinary and global in outlook, with researchers from all over the world.

The university also will look after staff well, with housing, recreational facilities, schools and so on. The main building itself is a fabulous glass-and-steel edifice overlooking a lagoon next to the sea.

But perhaps the biggest pull is the vision of the university’s leaders and the chance to make a mark right from the start in creating something different.

The university wants to focus on topics like solar energy — Saudi Arabia’s biggest asset after its oil and gas — as well as clean combustion, and the development of plants that can survive in hot desert conditions.

It is all is part of a plan to create a new “house of wisdom” and put science in the Islamic world back to the level it enjoyed centuries ago.

Well, that’s the spiel we’ve been hearing at the official press conference. But given that scientists are always moaning about a lack of cash, it’s hard to begrudge what is certainly an ambitious scientific venture.

And thanks to air conditioning, that baking heat is nicely out of reach.

Saudi Arabia opens huge new university

Over 3000 dignitaries from around the world are due to attend the official inauguration today of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Situated about 90 km north of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast, KAUST comes with an endowment of some $10bn and aims to become “one of the world’s great institutions of research”. The university, which has been built from scratch, has the personal backing of King Abdullah, who wants to “rekindle and spread the great and noble virtue of learning that has marked the Arab and Muslim worlds in earlier times”.

KAUST will be a graduate-level institution, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research in four main areas: materials science and engineering; resources, energy and environment; applied maths and computer science; and biosciences and bioengineering. It has already formed partnerships with some 27 other universities, including Harvard, Stanford and Caltech in the US and Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College in the UK. It has also joined forces with 11 industrial firms such as Boeing, IBM and Schlumberger. The university currently has 71 faculty staff, a figure that it hopes will eventually rise to 225.

Built from scratch

KAUST is an ambitious project in a country where many students go overseas for their education. It will initially offer two types of graduate courses – 18-month master’s degrees and PhDs lasting three or four years. Almost 7200 students from 61 different countries have already applied to study at KAUST. It has so far far accepted 817 graduates, of whom 44 will begin PhDs this autumn and 330 taking the master’s degree. The rest will start at KAUST from next year.

Despite having been built from nothing, KAUST has plenty of research facilities already in place. These include a nanofabrication, imaging and characterization lab, which includes no less than 10 NMR spectrometers, as well as a “fully immersive six-sided virtual-reality” facility, built with researchers at the University of California, San Diego, to carry out scientific visualization. KAUST will also have a 222-teraflop supercomputer that, it says, is the fastest supercomputer in the Middle East. Developed with IBM, it has been dubbed “Shaheen” from the Arabic for “falcon”.

Promise of freedom

Although Saudi Arabia is notorious for its rigid interpretation of Islam, KAUST says that it will be open to both men and women from around the world. It has promised that it will provide “unfettered” access to information and that it will “nurture and protect freedom of research, thought and discourse relating to scholarly work”. The university will also be overseen by an independent board of trustees, which includes former Irish president Mary Robinson and the current director-general of the CERN particle-physics lab, Rolf-Dieter Heuer.

The president of the university is Choon Fong Shih, a mechanical engineer who was formerly president and vice-chancellor of the National University of Singapore. Shih previously spent 30 years in the US, including spells as at Harvard and Brown universities and General Electric. He hopes that the number of papers published by KAUST faculty will, within a decade, equal those of scientists at the world’s best research universities.

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