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Home » Page 1530

Exposing the flaw in Planck’s law

Long-held suspicions that Planck’s law is violated at microscopic length scales now have the backing of experimental evidence.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University have shown that the law, which relates the radiation produced by an object to its temperature, under-estimates by up to three orders of magnitude the heat radiated when two objects are separated by just 30 nm.

These radiative heat-transfer measurements — the first on this length sale — were carried out by adding a gold layer to the cantilever of an atomic force microscope (AFM) so that it bends according to the amount of heat transferred.

Planck’s doubts

First formulated in 1900, Max Planck always suspected that his eponymous law was not valid at length scales comparable to the wavelength of thermal radiation, a regime known as the near-field. Calculations of radiation at these microscopic distances followed in the 1950s, but experimental verification proved elusive — until now.

Testing Planck’s law at the near-field requires holding two objects very close together, but preventing them from ever touching. “We tried for many years doing it with parallel plates,” says MIT’s Gang Cheng. But with that method, the smallest sustainable separations were a micron or more.

Switching to an AFM-based approach was the key to success. By attaching a small round glass bead to the apex of the cantilever, the researchers realized separations of tens of nanometers. The advantage of using a spherical object is that it is far easier to maintain a distance between single point and a surface, than between two surfaces.

Mitigating conduction

Cheng’s team measured heat-transfer rates between the glass bead and three different types of substrate: glass, doped-silicon and gold. Experiments were performed under vacuum to eliminate significant heat conduction across the air gap.

The researchers hit the gold layer of the cantilever with a 650 nm laser, which heated the sphere before it radiated and cooled. The extent of this heat loss was revealed by the subsequent bending of the cantilever, which is caused by the differences in the thermal expansion coefficients of the two materials.

The highest heat-transfer coefficient was found to occur between a glass bead and a glass substrate. These polar dielectric materials have surface phonon polaritons — which are created by resonant coupling between the electromagnetic field and optical phonons in polar dielectrics — and they strongly enhance the near-field radiation.

Improved recording heads

The efforts of Chen and his co-workers are not just of fundamental interest: they could also improve the thermal design of today’s magnetic heads in hard disc drives, which are separated from the discs by 5–7 nm. A resistor in the head causes it to heat up, and this recent work could allow engineers to manage this heat, or even use it to control the gap.

“There are also companies looking into heat-assisted magnetic recording technology,” says Chen. One option for increasing data storage density is to shrink the size of the data bits, but if they are too small data loss occurs due to magnetic domain fluctuations. “People have developed much harder magnets to prevent such fluctuations, but it is difficult to write on hard magnets. But using local heating, one can write the data,” he added.

The next goal for the researchers is to repeat their measurements at shorter separations. “Surface roughness is a big challenge,” says Chen, “and other problems are that of mechanical stability and cleanliness of surfaces — both are not easy to quantify.”

This research was published in Nano Letters.

Film review: The Matter of Everything

matterofeverything.jpg
Olga Antzoulatos in The Matter of Everything. Credit: Enrico Lappano

By Margaret Harris

This is the last in our current series of film reviews. Send us more films!

The narrator of The Matter of Everything spends most of the film looking puzzled. After all, it’s a puzzling world out there — full of particles that act like waves, matter turning into energy, and all sorts of strange things. Even empty space, it seems, is a lot more complicated than it looks. Such topics can easily ensnare experts in their conceptual knots, so any amateur willing to tackle them deserves a great deal of credit. Here, the brave newcomer is Olga Antzoulatos, a high school teacher who decides to spend some time interviewing particle physicists about their research. To this end, she travels to Fermilab and Toronto’s York University and starts asking questions.

With such a broad subject, and only 100 minutes of film to play with, it’s inevitable that some answers get short shrift. However, that’s not really the point; both Antzoulatos and filmmaker Enrico Lappano are far more interested in the sense of wonder that arises from contemplating nature on such a deep level. Sometimes their efforts pay off — like when Lappano’s camera seeks out a clutch of bird eggs amid concrete slabs at Fermilab, and one of Antzoulatos’ interviewees likens Ernest Rutherford’s experimental knack to “having a red phone to God”.

Still, there’s something missing from this film, and it isn’t a better description of quarks and gluons — it’s a better sense of why Antzoulatos chose to embark on her quest in the first place. What drew her to introduce students in her “Society: Challenge and Change” class to particle physics? How can we encourage more non-scientists to follow in her footsteps? As its title implies, The Matter of Everything is not short of ambition. It’s just a pity it didn’t ask a few more questions.

Are politicians playing poker with the world’s climate?

poker chips.jpg
Credit: Shutterstock

By James Dacey

As all earth scientists know, the climate is a fiendishly complex system and — whilst there is now broad agreement that anthropogenic climate change is happening — the extent and severity of its effects are still a matter of significant debate.

Now, when you toss this issue into the international policy arena you are also mixing it with all the national, economic and social issues that pervade the political decision making process. In short you have the recipe for some very messy negotiations.

So just how are climate practitioners (let alone interested citizens) supposed to make head or tail of political negotiations on the road to the UN conference on climate change taking place in Copenhagen this December?

Well a group of researchers in the US and Finland have come up with an interesting approach to this problem by framing the COP15 conference as a giant game of international poker.

In a paper released today the researchers outline the main “bargaining chips” which they say are being used by nations to negotiate a deal on climate change.

Sikina Jinnah of the American University and her colleagues’ main argument is that what some countries see as potential barriers, others see as gambling chips. For example, some developing countries may see the need for secure commitments on finance for adaptation to a low carbon society as a key barrier. However, these same countries may view mitigation actions on their part as a key bargaining chip to secure cash from developed countries on the adaptation issue.

Interestingly, this is not the first time that a gambling metaphor has been used in connection with anthropomorphic climate change. Back in March I wrote about the claim that we are playing roulette with the climate by taking a one in six chance of a “tipping event”.

For a more detailed review of this latest research then check out this article on environmentalresearchweb.org.

Astronauts wanted, but no body odour please

astronaut.jpg
Does my breath smell bad in this? (credit: NASA)

By Michael Banks

Astronauts are used to undergoing rigorous training for the physical and mental challenges that travelling to space brings.

Yet Chinese astronauts hoping to be part of China’s next space crew will now have to comply with an arduous 100 item health checklist that will act to quickly whittle down the number of people capable of being a “taikonaut”.

Along with having no family history of serious illnesses, aspiring Chinese taikonauts must also not suffer from drug allergies or have any tooth cavities.

Would-be taikonauts must also not have a runny nose, body odour, bad breath or have any scars that could burst open in space.

Shi Bing Bing, an official at one of the six astronaut health screening hospitals, told Reuters that the reason for the checklist is that the bad smells from the astronauts “would affect their fellow colleagues in a narrow space”.

And, finally, if a 100 item health checklist is not demanding enough, taikonauts will get nowhere unless they have permission from their spouse.

Parity violation in ytterbium is largest ever seen

Physicists in the US have detected the largest atomic parity violation ever seen, in a ytterbium atom — 100 times greater than the largest effect to date observed in caesium atoms. With further work, the results could shed new light on the way neutrons are distributed in nuclei, which would help physicists understand how weak interactions work within the nucleus.

Parity is the quantum mechanical transformation that flips the spatial co-ordinates of an object in 3D space. If a particle violates parity, its mirror image would behave differently and such particles can be described as right or left “handed”. The weak force violates parity by only acting on left-handed particles, leaving the right-handed ones untouched.

An historic violation

The theory of parity violation was first formulated in the mid 1950s by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee, who shared the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics for their efforts. Although it was first observed experimentally by studying how electrons are emitted by radioactive cobalt nuclei in the presence of a strong magnetic field by Chien-Shiung Wu at Columbia University.

It was not until the 1970s that French physicist Marie-Anne Bouchiat and her husband Claude realized that the size of the effect would increase with the cube of the atomic number, which suggested that parity violation should be easier to detect in heavier atoms. The largest and most accurate effect to date was detected by a group led by Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1997 in caesium with an accuracy of 0.3%.

Now, Dmitry Budker and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley have designed an experiment that exposes a beam of ytterbium atoms to perpendicular magnetic and electric fields. The field configuration sets the handedness of the experiment and a laser beam is used to excite the atoms’ electrons from the ground “singlet-S” state to the first excited “triplet-D” state. The team measured the excitation rate and found that with a left-handed field configuration, the atoms made the transition more often than with the right-handed configuration. Parity violation arises due to the weak force mixing the upper electronic energy state of the transition with a close-by state of opposite parity, (see diagram).

ytterbium forbidden transition
Formidden transition mixing explained

To ensure that it was parity violation being observed, the Berkeley researchers deliberately chose this “forbidden”, or highly unlikely, transition to eliminate other electromagnetic effects that would have been present in a more common transition. The team also managed to enhance the parity violation effect as a result of the applied electric field, which also mixes the opposite-parity states as a result of “Stark interference”, allowing the Yb atom to undergo the forbidden transition. The interference of the two types of mixing enabled the team to boost the effect they were looking for.

Beyond the standard model?

At the moment the results are not terribly accurate with an overall uncertainty of 14% but the team is working to improve on this. “This is enough to establish unambiguously that the effect is there and it is large,” says Budker. “The important point is that we start to probe nuclear weak interactions once we cross the 1% accuracy level in Yb, which we are very optimistic about,” he added.

A long-term goal is to use parity violation as a tool to look for new physics beyond the Standard Model. However, more immediate motivations include determining the distribution of neutrons within the nucleus, something that is hard to do with conventional methods due to neutrons’ lack of charge. This should confirm or dispel the “neutron skin” models which predict that the protons are surrounded by a slightly larger layer of neutrons.

Budker also hopes that the experiments might eventually reveal “anapole moments” which have so far only been seen in caesium. Anapole moments are associated with electric currents induced by the weak interaction which circulate within the nucleus like the currents inside a tokamak.

This research has been published on the arXiv preprint server.

Darwin’s grandson proved right over fishy physics

Darwin Year is now in full swing but the great evolutionary biologist was not the only member of the Darwin family to propose a scientific explanation for the behaviour of animals. His grandson — a British physicist, also called Charles — developed the novel idea that swimming marine life play a significant role in ocean mixing, an important process for distributing nutrients around the world’s oceans. Now, the Darwin family have yet another reason to celebrate this year, as a pair of researchers in California claim to have verified experimentally the theory of Charles Darwin Junior.

Fluid mixing processes are essential in the maintenance of global ocean circulation and they are also responsible for the transport of nutrients — a vital process in the marine ecosystem. Earth scientists have long-since agreed that this process is heavily influenced by atmospheric conditions, such as prevailing winds and heat exchange. However, for well over 100 years, some scientists have also argued that the action of fish swimming, when culminated over thousands of kilometres, could also have a part to play in the process.

Shake it like a seahorse

In the early 1950s Sir Charles Galton Darwin developed a physical model to explain how the movement of fish could be mixing the ocean. Darwin’s mechanism centred on the movement of fluid as fish swim vertically in a water column — marine animals are effectively dragging water with them as they swim up and down. As water pressure increases with depth, the swimming fish are continuously affecting the total potential energy of the fluid leading to further ambient fluid motions and eventually molecular mixing, claimed Darwin.

Partly because of inconclusive experimental results and partly because of the ongoing debates about atmospheric-ocean interaction, Darwin’s idea seemed to fall by the wayside in the mainstream research community. Fifty year later, however, Kakani Katija and John Dabiri at the California Institute of Technology say they have found firm experimental evidence to back up the idea of biogenic mixing. Enlisting the help of a team of scuba divers, the researchers captured the motion of jellyfish swimming vertically upwards from cold waters into warmer ones.

Mastigias jellyfish
In the spotlight lasers reveal motion

The major technical challenge was to capture the speed and direction of water when it is essentially transparent. By tracking the motion of particles suspended in the water, the researchers could determine how much kinetic energy an animal is injecting into the water as it swims. Particles were illuminated in a two-dimensional plane of the water and a video camera records the particle motion, in a process known as laser velocimetry. “For the divers the challenge is to control their body motions so that the camera is effectively stationary in the water, and so that the diver does not disturb the animals or the water around the animals being measured,” Dabiri told physicsworld.com.

Global mix

Another important challenge is to figure out how much Darwin’s mechanism could contribute to the overall process of ocean mixing. To do this, the researchers compare swimming efficiencies for the major marine species, with previous estimates of the total kinetic energy produced by turbulence in the wake of swimming fish. Publishing their findings in Nature, Katija and Dabiri suggest that ocean mixing due to Darwinian mixing is comparable with the global contribution of winds and tides.

“We expect to see Darwinian mixing in locations with large and dense aggregations of swimming animals that exhibit large vertical migrations. A candidate location is the Southern Ocean, where large communities of Antarctic krill perform these types of migrations,” said Dabiri.

Despite these new findings, it may still take further research for the idea to be fully accepted by the ocean science community. Eric Kunze, an ocean physicist at the University of Victoria in Canada explained that it has taken a long time to develop our current models of mixing caused by atmospheric conditions and there are still many unanswered questions. “The biological mixing mechanism appears to be even more challenging so I suspect it will be some time before we have an understanding of it,” he said.

The wider context of this research is the influence it could have on climate modelling. Amongst other effects, an increasing presence of presence of nutrients near the ocean surface could lead to algal blooms — a potential carbon sink. “An increase in one animal population can drive a decrease in another, and vice versa. Since not all animals will mix the ocean with the same efficacy, we must concern ourselves not only with the numbers of animals but also the species involved,” Dabiri told physicsworld.com.

Chamber simulates space on Earth

The cost of failure of a space mission is millions or even billions of dollars and, more importantly, could lead to loss of life. So testing spacecraft is an important part of developing new ways to travel into space. Those that carry personnel, such as the Orion capsule — part of NASA’s Constellation programme to return astronauts to the Moon — must function properly in the severe conditions of space to ensure the health and safety of the individuals on board.

The Space Power Facility (SPF) at NASA’s Glenn Research Center’s Plumbrook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, is the world’s largest space-simulation chamber used to test spacecraft. The cathedral-like chamber is 37 m tall and 30 m across, with a volume of around 23,000 m3. The facility — known as a thermal vacuum chamber — can reproduce both the temperature and pressure of space. The latter can vary from around 10–3 mbar at 50 km from Earth to 10–6 mbar at 170 km away.

Craft for testing can have a mass of up to 270 tonnes and either be built in the chamber or brought in prefabricated via two 15 ×  15 m doors and three sets of standard-gauge rail tracks. The temperature can be adjusted from –150 to 50 °C by a “thermal surface” with an area of about 1500 m2. A craft is not placed in direct contact with the surface, which means that its temperature change is due to radiation heat transfer. The temperature-controlled surface is cooled by a huge container with a million litres of liquid nitrogen and two 2.2 MW gas compressors. Infrared quartz lamps — simulating the radiation heat transfer from the Sun — are arranged around the object to be tested.

The SPF chamber can be pumped down from atmospheric pressure to high vacuum in less than 20 h using a unique technique. “Roots pumps”, which consist of two figure-of-eight-shaped lobes or impellers that rotate at 1500–3500 rpm, are first used to quickly remove the large volume of air. These work not by the principle of gas expansion and compression but by moving a volume of gas. The pumping speed is set by the internal volume of the pump multiplied by the rotational speed of the pump, so a physically bigger pump has a higher pumping speed. Evacuating the chamber is done via groups of Roots pumps in parallel, known as “stages”, which have a common inlet and a common outlet pressure. For example, a two-stage system has a first stage consisting of a group of pumps that remove air from the vacuum chamber, and exhaust it into a second stage of pumps that then pumps the chamber to a lower pressure.

At the SPF the first stage has four Roots pumps arranged in parallel and connected to the vacuum chamber through a 1.2 m diameter pipe. This stage evacuates the chamber from atmospheric pressure to 600 mbar in about 20 min. Two Roots pumps in parallel with a 60 cm inlet piping then evacuate the chamber to 390 mbar in another 20 min before two Roots pumps with 45 cm diameter inlet piping reduce the pressure to about 170 mbar after an additional 20 min. The fourth stage, consisting of two pumps with 35 cm inlet piping, reduces the pressure to 90 mbar in a further 20 min. Finally, six rotary piston pumps in parallel with 15 cm inlet piping kick in to bring the chamber to 0.0133 mbar in an additional 30 min. Rotary piston pumps use a piston to expand and compress a gas, similar to an air compressor. The fifth stage then exhausts to atmosphere.

These five stages of pumps remove 53 tonnes of air, and then they are isolated from the chamber so that the helium cyropumps can come online to remove the remaining 700 g of air. Helium cryopumps operate by freezing the air inside the vacuum chamber and then collecting it on the cold surfaces of the pumps, which are at a temperature of 15 K. When enough ice has built up on the cold surfaces, the pumps must be warmed to release the air. This type of pump can only operate under vacuum conditions. After around 70 min the chamber vacuum level is reduced to 3 ×  10–5 mbar by 10 helium cryo-pumps. The vacuum level is reduced to less than 10–7 mbar in an additional 3–10 h.

We recently tested the air-bag landing system for the Mars Exploration Rover mission by simulating the conditions that would be experienced when landing on the Martian surface. This revealed that the air bags would be torn to shreds during the actual landing of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Without ground testing, and overcoming these issues with the help of the SPF, the rovers would have crash-landed on Mars at a cost of around $820m.

Diamond coatings are branching out

Diamond — hard, sparkling and bright — has been revered for thousands of years as a gemstone. Nowadays it is also widely used in industry, with the first papers on “polycrystalline” diamond having been published as far back as 1911. However, it was not until 1971 that Sol Aisenberg and Ronald Chabot at Whitaker Corporation in the US discovered a new form of carbon that had the same form of bonding as diamond, but that was amorphous rather than crystalline. Created using ion-beam deposition, these thin films were coined “diamond-like carbon” (DLC) and are now used in everything from razor blades to computer hard disks.

Since then, researchers have worked hard to study the properties of DLC, which follows the contours of the surface rather than “filling in” the peaks and valleys. It is also highly smooth, its low friction arising from the relatively large proportion (65%) of diamond-like sp3 bonds between pairs of carbon atoms and the relatively small proportion (35%) of graphite-like sp2 bonds, which makes it amorphous rather than crystalline. Indeed, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have characterized different types of DLCs according to how they are formed and the percentage of sp2, sp3 and (sometimes) hydrogen bonds.

Another interesting feature of DLC is that it can be deposited onto substrate materials at temperatures of 200–300 °C, whereas polycrystalline materials have to be deposited at a much higher 800–1200 °C and so cannot be coated onto substrates that change phase below this temperature. Unfortunately, it is not easy to produce useful DLC films that are thicker than about 3–5 µm because the high temperatures used to make them generates stresses inside the materials, which then expand on their substrates. Now, however, Diamond Hard Surfaces Ltd has developed and patented a process for producing a material that bridges the gap between traditional DLCs and polycrystalline diamond.

The result is a hard, low-friction amorphous material, named Adamant, that can be applied in thicknesses of 40 µm and beyond, which is an order of magnitude higher than other technologies. Created using a patented plasma-assisted chemical vapour deposition (CVD) process operating at less than 100 °C, the material has a hardness of 3500–4000 on the Vickers hardness (HV) scale as a result of its very high proportion (~99%) of sp3 bonds. (The hardness of tungsten carbide, in comparison, is only 2000 HV.) The process uses ultra-high-vacuum conditions and involves splitting up carbon-containing molecules, with the resulting ions being accelerated towards the surface of a substrate on which tetrahedrally bonded carbon (i.e. diamond) is formed.

Adamant has many potential applications, particularly those where bulk materials (e.g. tungsten carbide) and coatings (e.g. hard chrome) are used in thick layers of up to 100 µm. Indeed, since Adamant is 12–15 times as wear-resistant as tungsten carbide and about twice as hard, any film made from it will last far longer than a tungsten-carbide film of the same thickness. That hardness makes the material useful for oil and gas firms that send drill bits and other moving parts long distances down underground shafts to reach the source of fuel. Adamant is also being used to make everything from long-life cam shafts for the motor-sport industry, where engines are not allowed to be opened up between races, to sharp, longer-lasting knives to cut plastic sheets as they roll off an industrial production line.

Adamant, which is transparent to infrared light, could also be used in the defence and aerospace industries. For example, the infrared light that missiles use to guide themselves to a target is usually directed through a sapphire window. Coating the sapphire with Adamant would make it much tougher and reduce the possibility of the window becoming damaged due to the abrasive effect of air rushing past. Another advantage is Adamant’s “green” credentials: it does not need much energy to be made, uses harmless precursors and does not need any energy-intensive pre- and post-processing.

Owing to the low deposition temperature, the material can be coated on a variety of substrates, such as copper, aluminium, silicon carbide, tungsten carbide, titanium and even plastics, such as polyetheretherketone. The process is scalable and our company has just completed a new facility to make Adamant in large enough quantities to satisfy customer demand. There is plenty that we do not yet know about the boundaries between amorphous carbon and polycrystalline diamond, and our company is hoping to fill that gap.

From prairie to energy frontier

Fermilab, the scientific research facility, has for the past 37 years transformed a 10-square-mile patch of the Illinois prairie into the frontier of high-energy particle physics. Fermilab, the book, is the first written history of this unique place, covering both the birth of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and its journey to its current position as a world centre of “megascience”. Yet Fermilab is far from being a dry historical account. It spans the entire spectrum of what is required to establish a cutting-edge facility and perform research there — from organizational aspects and technological choices to the sociology and politics of funding and site selection. The creation of Fermilab was a far cry from the establishment of a shining light on the prairie; rather, it was a practical solution for passionate researchers, driven to do physics amid the real-world constraints of shrinking federal science budgets.

One reason that there is more to Fermilab than just a simple history is that its authors Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne Kolb and Catherine Westfall all have a long association with the lab. Hoddeson, the Thomas M Siebel Professor of History of Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was first hired by Fermilab to document its history in 1977, just five years after the lab opened. Kolb has been Fermilab’s archivist since 1983, while Westfall, currently visiting associate professor at Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University, wrote about Fermilab’s history in her doctoral dissertation, which was directed by Hoddeson. This closeness allows the authors to give the reader a true insider’s perspective, and by “living” their story they can offer insight and commentary that go beyond the bare facts. They give a sense of the drama and understand the personalities of those involved, and their passion and fondness for Fermilab come shining through in this illuminating book.

Fermilab concentrates on the first two decades of research at the lab, when physicists were engrossed in the hunt for new particles and new interactions, as well as the underlying explanation for what they found. The book is heavily footnoted and carefully referenced, and the text is sometimes quite dense; it includes many technical details that are only relevant to those in the business of high-energy physics. However, underneath this detail is a simple, clear narrative that follows the paths of the lab’s first two directors, Robert Wilson and Leon Lederman, their unique visions for the facility and their quests to realize their dreams for its future.

The book begins in the postwar era of the 1960s, when resources for science were abundant and particle physicists were busy finding new particles. Further progress in this search — then as now — required beams of ever-increasing energy. In the field of particle physics, scientists can convert energy into mass; thus a higher-energy collider allows physicists to create more massive particles and probe deeper into the quantum universe. Fermilab was envisioned by the US high-energy physics community as the next step in that progression. However, neither the type of accelerator nor its location were unanimously agreed upon by the high-energy physics community at the time. For example, the book’s first 100 pages describe in striking detail the dramatic way in which scientific and political discussions during the 1960s led to the selection of the Weston, Illinois, site over the perhaps more obvious Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

A second controversy surrounded the choice of Robert Rathbun Wilson, an outspoken and perhaps brash opponent of the Berkeley design, as the lab’s first director. Wilson’s credo was that “any technology that works the first time is overdesigned and thus overpriced”, and his style was to cut costs to a bare minimum. His inspirational leadership and cowboy ingenuity got Fermilab through a trying construction phase. Wilson was able to establish a working accelerator laboratory, and in so doing, he also established a culture and spirit that exists at the lab to this day.

Still, the 1970s were a difficult period for the lab. It is not enough to merely establish a new facility; one has to then use it to advance our understanding of nature. However, in the beginning Fermilab was not awash with discoveries. Important developments in physics like the discovery of weak neutral currents and the charm quark — both well within the lab’s grasp — took place at competing facilities. Wilson resigned in 1978 amid funding troubles, leaving the lab’s future in the hands of Leon Lederman, then a professor of physics at Columbia University.

Known for his keen instincts, sharp wit and strong advocacy for physics and physics education, Lederman would go on to share the 1988 Nobel Prize for Physics for his pioneering work with neutrinos. As Fermilab director, he used his considerable personal charisma to garner the political support that the lab needed to build the Energy Doubler, a new accelerator that used superconducting-magnet technology to give Fermilab an unprecedented new window into the world of quarks. This was a major scientific step forward, and one Wilson had been unable to accomplish. In 1983, the Doubler beam was commissioned, and the accelerator renamed the Tevatron.

During the Lederman era, which ended when he stepped down in 1988, experiments grew larger and more complex, as improving our understanding of the fundamental questions that govern matter required big experimental tools and, consequently, large teams of scientists. By the early 1980s, when the lab secured funding from the US Department of Energy for two new colliding-beam detectors, true large-scale science was becoming the norm. Building the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) required a team of several hundred physicists; DZero, a second giant detector built across the ring from (and in competition with) CDF, needed another few hundred. In 1986 a programme of colliding proton and antiproton beams was in place, and the effort paid off: the book ends in 1995 with the joint discovery of the top quark by the CDF and DZero collaborations.

Fermilab will be of interest to anyone curious about science and science policy, as well as those who want a better understanding of what it is like to perform large-scale research in high-energy particle physics. It is particularly relevant reading now, with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) about to restart. Many decisions facing CERN today have parallels in issues that Fermilab dealt with decades earlier — including how to commission a new accelerator safely, and the trade-offs between perfection and just making things work.

Both labs are currently involved in a decade-long search for the Higgs boson — the long-sought and perhaps final missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. However, Fermilab’s long-term future is currently uncertain. It will soon hand over the mantle of the “energy frontier” to CERN, leaving it without a clear mission. The lab has ambitious plans to redefine itself and to take over leadership of the “intensity frontier” — that is, to create a new accelerator complex capable of producing the high-intensity beams of particles necessary for a different “brand” of physics. However, only time will tell how Fermilab Volume II will read.

Once a physicist: Conrad C Lautenbacher Jr


What sparked your interest in physics?

I have always been fascinated with science, and when I was 12 or 13, I was fortunate to have teachers who encouraged this interest. My father also had an aptitude for science and mathematics; he was a naturally intelligent individual who left high school before graduating and became a dental technician because his family needed him to work — this was during the Great Depression. So I believe this interest is in my genes.

What led you to join the Navy?

I grew up in Philadelphia, and one of my teachers who had a son at the Naval Academy would read letters from him to the class. These letters fascinated me — they were full of adventure and excitement, with descriptions of places I had never seen. By the time I joined the Navy in 1960, students at the Naval Academy were allowed to choose a major subject, rather than focusing solely on a military and engineering curriculum, so I took every course I could in mathematics and physics. I graduated with a double major in both subjects in 1964, and then went to sea for four months on an aircraft carrier before beginning a programme leading to a PhD in applied mathematics at Harvard University.

How did you get into oceanography?

My Navy and science interests came together in the subject of fluid mechanics and I enrolled in a number of graduate-level courses in the subject. My PhD involved building tsunami models, which is an oceanographic application of this topic. In the late 1960s computers were still fairly primitive, so my model of how tsunamis run up onto islands used an IBM 7094, which required punch cards and had a memory that was probably smaller than your watch has today.

What are you working on now?

I spent many years in the Navy learning how to lead and manage large-scale operations, and I have just finished an eight-year spell as administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has one of the largest research infrastructures of any single agency in the world — it even has people living at the South Pole recording atmospheric composition and investigating ozone-hole physics. Now I am working for the Computer Sciences Corporation and a subsidiary company, Antarctic Research Support, which is bidding for the next contract to support the US National Science Foundation’s work in Antarctica. Operating in Antarctica requires more than just scientists researching neutrino detection and ice-sheet mechanics — it also requires a unique and specialized support system. Antarctica has perhaps the harshest environment in the world and supply lines that stretch more than a third of the way around the Earth. Meeting the needs of daily living is an enormous challenge.

What are your views on climate change?

Whatever we do about climate change, we need to base it on sound science, which means investing in improved observing systems and obtaining climate-level data. As head of NOAA, I spent a lot of time organizing an international consortium to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) — including satellites and atmospheric-, ground- and ocean-measurement systems — so that, among other things, we can improve our understanding of climate dynamics. The models today are much better than the ones that existed a decade ago, but they are still not accurate enough to project very far into the future, and certainly not for 100 years from now. We know that the Earth has been warming, and we know that there are effects that, if extended, will cause ­significant problems. So we know enough to do something, but in my view the choice of what to do is a political question. As a scientist, I try to stay out of those kinds of debates.

What is your advice for physicists who want to tackle environmental problems?

First, work in a field associated with geosciences. For the future of the human species, we need more people who are interested in Earth sciences. The second thing is to think big. If we are going to solve the climate problem, or build a sustainable society, we need breakthrough scientific work. We have maybe a couple of generations to resolve these issues. I do not want to be negative — I am a glass-half-full person — but I do want to support the need for nations to invest more in Earth sciences and environmental education for the public. I reorganized NOAA in a way that aligned agency offices to mirror the relationships that exist among the Earth’s natural systems. It is counterproductive to isolate scientific disciplines such as meteorology, biology, geological surveying and so on — they are naturally connected by Earth systems’ dynamics. Earth scientists of all disciplines must talk to each other and break down the barriers of jargon and culture.

How do you feel your physics training has helped in your career?

Many people do not understand that physics is an important practical subject. Today’s world is highly technical. We cannot exist without the benefits of scientific discoveries — they are commonplace and everywhere around us. Physics has helped me in the same way that it helps everyone — the art of daily living requires both an appreciation and an understanding of scientific and physical processes. All of us must realize that the future of society depends on this technical world being supported properly, and also improved rapidly to reach the goal of a sustainable future for the human species.

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