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Home » Page 1878

Plutonium puzzle pieced together

Plutonium expands by 25% when its crystal structure changes from its ‘alpha’ form, at around 400 K, to its ‘delta’ form at 600 K. But the theory typically used to explain crystal structure, known as density functional theory, cannot account for this increase. Moreover, density functional theory also predicts magnetic effects that have never been observed.

The jump in volume is closely linked to the position of plutonium in the periodic table, according to Savrasov and colleagues. Plutonium is one of a series of heavy elements known as the actinides. The electrostatic attraction between the nucleus and the orbiting electrons grows stronger throughout the series because each successive element has an extra electron and proton.

Early in the series – up to and including plutonium – the electrons are loosely bound in the atom and the outer electron orbitals overlap. This effect is known as delocalization: electrons wander through the crystal lattice and the element is metallic. But in americium, the element that follows plutonium in the actinide series, the electrons are tightly bound: their outer orbits do not overlap and the electrons are ‘localized’.

Savrasov’s group suggests that the ‘delta’ crystal structure of plutonium is the missing link between plutonium and americium – they believe it combines both localized and delocalized electrons. They successfully enlisted a different model – known as dynamical mean-field theory – which explains the properties of materials like superconductors in which interactions between electrons are an important factor. They found that by incorporating the effects of electron interactions in plutonium, the theory could accurately predict its unusual structural behaviour.

“The atomic charge and crystal structure are the only essential inputs for the computer simulation”, Savrasov told PhysicsWeb. “It allows us to predict structural details as they change with, for example, temperature and pressure – and for materials as toxic as plutonium, this is extremely valuable information”.

Magic material flips refractive index

Shelby’s team created the ‘left-handed’ material – so called because it reverses one of the well-known ‘right-hand rules’ of physics – from interlocking sections of copper coils and wires. When microwave radiation was shone into a prism-shaped chunk of this ‘meta-material’ – composed of repeating sub-units of coils and wires – they found that it bent towards the normal. In a conventional optical medium like glass, radiation bends away from the normal – this is why deep water looks shallow.

Such left-handed materials were first predicted to exist in 1967 by the Russian physicist Victor Veselago. He realised that one of Maxwell’s famous equations – which describe the interplay of electromagnetic waves and matter – has a special solution when both the electric permittivity and magnetic permeability are negative. This solution corresponds to a material with a negative refractive index.

The confirmation that the left-handed material works follows the recent demonstration by John Pendry and co-workers at Imperial College, UK, that a lattice of copper wires could have negative electric permittivity for some wavelengths. His group went on to show that an array of copper coils could have negative magnetic permeability. “My colleague David Smith then had a brilliant insight”, Schultz told PhysicsWeb. “If we combined the wires with the coils we could create a material in which both parameters are negative”.

Schultz’s group became interested in composite materials after experimenting with copper components in photonic bandgap materials. “We used Maxwell’s equations in our simulations and experiments, so we realised the significance of the negative electric and magnetic parameters”, says Schultz.

There are many practical applications for materials with a negative refractive index, including band-pass filters and lenses with sub-wavelength resolution. They may even have the striking ability to reverse the Doppler effect. It is unlikely, however, that the new material can be scaled down to operate at optical frequencies, according to Schultz and colleagues. “But we do think we can get much closer to the visible wavelengths than microwaves”, says Schultz, “and we have other ideas for creating the effect in the optical range”.

Internet aids the spread of computer viruses

Pastor-Satorras and Vespignani are condensed matter physicists working in the field of statistical physics. “We are interested in the characterization of complex systems and the study of epidemic spreading in networks was a natural extension of our work”, Vespignani, who works at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy, told PhysicsWeb.

Earlier investigations of the circulation of computer viruses on the Internet were based on biological models of the spread of epidemics in the population. But Pastor-Satorras, who works at the Universitat Polytècnica de Catalunya in Spain, and Vespignani realised that there is a crucial difference in the topologies – that is, the layouts of links and ‘nodes’ – in the two types of network. “We analysed real data from digital epidemics and noticed that they behaved very differently from biological epidemics”, says Vespignani.

The Internet is a ‘scale-free’ network in which just a few nodes have very many connections. Computer viruses spread very quickly through such a system because they can be transmitted simultaneously to many other sites. In contrast, the nodes in a social network have on average the same – relatively small – number of links to other nodes. An infection spreads through the population at a certain rate, but people also recover at a particular rate. This results in a critical level of the spread of the infection known as the epidemic threshold. Above the threshold the disease infects a constant proportion of the population. Below the threshold, it surfaces only in occasional pockets

“It was obvious that we needed to include the scale-free properties of the Internet in the computer virus model”, says Vespignani. The pair simulated the spread of viruses using the new model and found that the epidemic threshold is completely absent from scale-free networks. This means that even a slowly spreading computer virus can proliferate over the Internet. “We hope that our work will help to devise strategies to protect computer networks from digital infections”, says Vespignani.

Slingshot test for general relativity

In 1915, Einstein proposed that gravity actually distorts the fabric of space. His calculations perfectly explained certain astronomical observations that Newtonian physics could not account for – such as the apparently exaggerated precession of Mercury’s orbit. “General relativity is at the heart of everything in cosmology”, says team member Ephraim Fischbach, “so it’s very important we continue to test it to make sure its predictions are correct”.

The Small Interstellar Probe mission currently under consideration by NASA needs to perform a close fly-by of the Sun to gather enough momentum to propel itself outside the solar system. This ‘slingshot’ manoeuvre will take the craft to within 4 solar radii of the Sun. The probe’s chief goal is to establish the composition of interstellar space, but Longuski and colleagues hope it will be able to include their experiment. “We can’t get as precise a measurement by merely observing the planets in their orbits”, Longuski told PhysicsWeb, “but we can control this experiment by selecting a trajectory for the spacecraft”.

Other tests of general relativity have involved measurements of redshifts, the deflection of light by stars and galaxies, and tests of the inverse square law of gravity. Technological advances – such as improvements in the accuracy of atomic clocks – have improved our understanding of general relativity in recent decades.

To accurately determine the effects of relativity, Longuski and colleagues must eliminate other influences on the spacecraft’s motion, including radiation pressure, the solar wind, interplanetary dust and magnetic fields. The team believes that with existing technology the experiment will estimate key mathematical parameters in the theory to within an accuracy of 16% – but this will plummet to 0.2% with expected improvements in the measurement of the spacecraft’s position. As Longuski says: “If we find that Einstein was wrong, it would be big news”.

Facing up to the mystery of God

“Science without religion is lame, but religion without science is blind.” Einstein’s teasing remark is just one of the many contributions by scientists to religious thought that have interested theologians of many shades since antiquity. Recently the debate on science and religion has expanded at a huge rate. Few would now deny that it has an important place in wider discussions about ethics in science or the public’s perception of science.

Historically, religion has motivated both the substance and the interpretation of science. John Polkinghorne is, however, one of the few contributors to this multicoloured debate who can lay claim to professional experience in both science and theology. A theoretical particle physicist until 1981, he retrained in theology and was ordained as an Anglican priest, also serving for a time as president of Queen’s College, Cambridge. He has written a series of influential books – both popular and in a more serious vein – since then, including his Gifford lectures of 1993-4, published as Science and Christian Belief (SPCK 1994).

Physicists with even half an eye on science and religion could fill their bookshelves many times over with the weight of published material. The literature is not only voluminous but also currently rather stratified. The debate presented by the popular media, for example, bears little resemblance to discussions among informed scientists, which is often unrelated to developments in university theology and philosophy departments.

So what – and at what level – is Polkinghorne adding? And what does a physicist-turned-theologian actually have to say about theology? (Polkinghorne’s own answers are that he is one of a small band of “scientist-theologians”, and he is contributing as a “bottom-up thinker”.)

His new book, Faith, Science and Understanding, summarizes his work on science and religion over the last decade and draws together some provisional conclusions. Six of the nine chapters are based on recent lectures and papers, so, inevitably, the collection contains some weak links and repetition. However, some coherence is generated by the division of the book into three broad sections. Polkinghorne first discusses a few “current issues”, then tackles the thorny question of divine agency in the world, before reviewing some other current thinkers in the field.

Polkinghorne’s chosen “issues” set the scene for the book. Closely linked, they cover a defence of theology as a current academic subject and outline his “motivations for belief”. The next two chapters sustain the old tension of theology “revealed” (i.e. by reading sacred books) or “natural” (i.e. by reading from the works of nature). The section concludes by revisiting themes from his earlier books, ranging from critical realism to chaos theory.

So why does Polkinghorne think we should believe in God at all? I find it quite amusing to see just how close his answers are to his reasons why we should believe in, say, quarks or gluons. Polkinghorne’s training as a scientist clearly emerges when he says that the theological project possesses a “defining explanatory principle” and constitutes a “theory of everything”; or when he describes the Bible as “laboratory notebooks of gifted observers of God’s ways with men and women”.

After a while the presentation of every question from this perspective begins to feel claustrophobic – even for a physicist. More alluring is the expressed hope that the wonderful but strange intelligibility of the world might be illuminated by theology. Does our experience of meaning in the way we do science hint at God? I was reminded of the way that the social scientist Peter Berger’s book A Rumour of Angels teases out theological threads from our institutional practice, and rather wished that this, along with other more promising themes, had been developed further.

Another example of Polkinghorne’s light touch is his robust call for renewed belief in the unity of knowledge in academia – with theology as the uniting context. This vital issue has its roots in the early writings of the theologian Tertullian in 3 AD and will unfortunately sound almost ridiculously conservative to the post-modern ear. It is perhaps a shame that Polkinghorne’s overtly conservative Christian theology might predispose more radical readers against his argument here, for surely something is needed to bring a sense of “one world” into our fractured universities.

I am also a little disappointed by the lack of any real discussion of biblical or other sacred texts. There is an unspoken assumption that they are, at best, background material, and at worst irrelevant to the current discussion of science and religion. Yet these texts have been the bedrock of belief for everyone who has worked at the pressure points of science and religion throughout history.

There is, for example, far more relevant material than the hoary old Genesis texts. In fact, I got excited when it looked as if we would be treated in some depth to the most glorious example in the Old Testament – the “Lord’s Answer” to Job ( Job 39-40). It’s a breathtaking poem, working on many levels, posing imaginative and creative questions – surely the central scientific act? – about the workings of the physical world. If you have never read these verses, then I would strongly encourage you to do so. Sadly, they are relegated in Faith, Science and Understanding to an illustration of how we need to choose carefully between images of God offered by the Old Testament.

The theme of the book’s central section has also been Polkinghorne’s central question since he started writing about theology. How, he asks, does God act, or cause things, in the world of space and time? It’s a delicate balancing act: too firm a grip and God gets the blame for everything; too little and the deity becomes dispensable. Of course, science complicates the issue further because it believes that the study of causation (or “ontology”) belongs very firmly to its own patch.

Indeed, our apparently increasing knowledge (“epistemology”) of the physical world seemed in the 18th century to have excluded the idea of a currently active God altogether. Polkinghorne sees, however, in some aspects of 20th-century science – for example, in the “fuzziness” of our knowledge in quantum theory and chaos theory – a way of reconciliation. In a sentence that he likes so much that he serves it up for us twice, he argues that these “epistemological defects become ontological opportunities”. He expresses, as he has in previous books, his preference for the exquisite sensitivity of chaotic dynamic systems in permitting a “top down” flow of causation in nature, calling it “active information”.

There is some nice discussion of how very new scientific ideas engage with very old theological ones. My favourite is the discussion of “kenosis”, or the self-abasing of God in the Christian incarnation. Perhaps a God self-denying enough to become human might also deny himself a total physical mastery of the world. But I would have preferred a more boldly stated case than that which Polkinghorne provides. I also missed any real discussion of the objections to this approach, including the implicit acceptance of a critical realist stance and its limitations. We are told that “almost all scientists” work within a critical realist metaphysics, but where, I wonder, are the statistics? I know several colleagues who are unashamed idealists!

The last section of the book helped me to understand the first two. It’s a helpful summary of the contributions of three other 20th-century thinkers in the field: the mainstream theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg; the reformed theologian Thomas Torrence; and the theoretical physicist and popular-science writer Paul Davies. I am not clear why the choice is so restrictive among the dozen or more names that are given in footnotes to the rest of the text, and many others that are not, but as we have already noted, Polkinghorne tends to steer clear of biblical and historical approaches.

A quirky final chapter has the enticing title “Science and theology in England”. Polkinghorne is clearly proud of England’s “empiricist” inheritance, and of the increasing contribution of his country to the field. However, I was surprised to find no mention at all of the historians John Brooke and Geoff Cantor, paradoxically, in the one section that attempts to draw lessons from history. They have shown elegantly and convincingly how much the study of science and religion benefits from an appreciation of historical context – never more so than at the present. I certainly agree with Polkinghorne’s final judgement that, in this subject, “exciting times lie ahead”.

Investors in people

Congratulations, you’ve developed a unique technology. You’ve done your homework and you’re convinced that there is a market for it. But before you throw away your lecture notes and hang up your safety goggles, it is worth asking yourself a few more questions. After all, physicists enter a different world when they launch a start-up. First they must switch to a new way of thinking and a radically different style of communication. Relocating to a new office off-campus, wearing sharp suits and giving PowerPoint presentations may be a step in the right direction. But are you really cut out for life in an entrepreneurial world?

Physicist Alex Glass is no stranger to entrepreneurs. Before moving to the US Air Force’s European research and development office in London earlier this year, he spent six years at the helm of an organization that helps emerging technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area – the undisputed capital of start-ups. Glass believes that successful entrepreneurs are unique people. “They are strong-willed when everything looks as if it will fail, yet they are flexible enough to change strategy when the market changes,” he explains. “These two characteristics are so contradictory. But you need them both to be successful.”

To transform your start-up from an idea to reality – and to make it grow – you’ll also have to attract people with management, marketing and business expertise. You’ll also have to be prepared to divide the rewards with them. “I always tell scientists who complain that it’s better to own a 10% share in a large company than a 100% share in a small one,” says Glass.

Ups and downs of business

In many respects, physicists and entrepreneurs seem poles apart. In an ever-changing business environment there is often not enough time to assimilate all the data and analyse a problem scientifically. Glass recommends that physicists should ask themselves if they would feel comfortable making decisions without knowing all the information. “Physicists must be able to explain their goals to investors succinctly,” he adds. Scientific entrepreneurs tend to get carried away describing the wonders of their technology, rather than addressing the important issues of defining the market and competition, or how the product will be sold.

The same views are held by physicist David Potter, the founder and chairman of Psion, the mobile computer and communications company. “Most of the business plans I see are driven by what the engineers can do; not what the market wants or what the customer needs,” he adds. However, physicists do bring enormous benefits to business. “Physics teaches hard, abstract, logical thinking, which is exactly what one needs in industry,” says Potter. “I would encourage any physicist who is thinking of going into business to do so.”

Ilya Fishman, a founder of Optimight – an optical-networking company in San Jose, California – agrees: “Physicists can bring more to a company than engineers. They have an orthogonal way of thinking that can lead to new technological advances.”

That said, physicists who are tempted to start up their own companies must have the emotional stability to go through the ups and downs of business. “Are you prepared to put everything on the line for the company?” adds Glass. “Many successful entrepreneurs have come within days of becoming bankrupt. And so many marriages fail because of the stress involved. It affects the whole family.”

Another emotional challenge for scientific entrepreneurs is recognizing when it is time to let go of the technology. “Only 1 in 10 000 start-ups are successful enough to attract large-scale funding from venture capitalists,” explains Glass. “Unless your company is profitable from an early stage, the most likely outcome is that you’ll have to sell your technology to a ‘systems integrator’ – particularly if it is only a small part of a final product.” Are you prepared to relinquish control of “your baby” to someone else? Sharing a common vision of the company’s goals and objectives with your investors eases the pain.

Band of angels

Many technology entrepreneurs, particularly in the Bay Area, are not content to set up a single company. Often they invest their own money in companies starting up in the field in which they made their fortunes. In the US, these so-called business angels invest $15-30bn in some 30 000 businesses each year, spreading their investment over eight times as many companies as venture capitalists. But angels provide much more than just money. They bring knowledge of the market, experience and a wealth of contacts in both the industry and investment communities. They also act as mentors, advising companies in the early stages on how to start a business and how to present themselves to potential investors. “Having an angel gives a company credibility,” says Glass.

Far-reaching vision and business acumen are important characteristics of angels, but it is their personal qualities that are highly regarded. Des Smith, founder of Edinburgh Instruments, says that successful entrepreneurs are often good judges of people – a trait that is needed when it comes to putting together the management team. “Often you do not know if people will work well together until you try,” he explains.

Glass most admires Milton Chang who founded Newport Research, a US manufacturer of optical components, in the 1960s when lasers were first beginning to take shape. Chang recognized that they would have an enormous commercial impact and that soon everyone would clamour to buy laser components and equipment. “He has vision, stature and is an excellent mentor and counsellor,” explains Glass.

Meanwhile, Fishman recalls the support he received from venture capitalists John Walecka and Tony Sun, when he founded Optimight two years ago. “They were patient, friendly and understanding at a difficult time,” he adds. The old adage that investors invest in people, not products, has never been so true.”

Laser jocks reach the big time

During the Californian gold rush 150 years ago, the people who made the real fortunes were the merchants selling picks, shovels and jeans, rather than the gold miners. The story is similar in today’s telecommunications industry. While the dot.com bubble appears to be bursting, the optoelectronics companies that supply the picks and shovels for the Internet are booming. Indeed, the global market for lasers, displays and fibre-optics technology is estimated to be worth over £140bn and is growing by 25% each year.

Recent surveys indicate that Scotland’s share of the spoils is increasing rapidly. The Scottish optoelectronics industry is currently worth £600m and is expected to grow to £1.6bn by 2005. Some 4000 people are currently employed in the sector, including 450 researchers in 16 university departments that specialize in optoelectronics. Indeed, Scotland has a long tradition of innovation in the field of optoelectronics with world-class teams working on ultrafast lasers, all-optical switching and optical computing.

Several centres have recently been set up to bridge the gap between academic research and industry. The Photonics Innovation Centre at St Andrews University, for example, provides facilities that enable prototype devices to be designed, manufactured and fully tested. Meanwhile, Compound Semiconductor Technologies Ltd – a technology-transfer company in Glasgow – offers services that include a £7.5m “foundry” for fabricating III-V semiconductors. Such facilities allow fledgling start-up companies to cut the costs, time and risk associated with commercializing new technologies.

Spotlight on displays

When it comes to research, Napier University is not considered one of the heavyweights in Scotland. But that has not stopped the institution from spinning off companies. Freelight Systems was founded in 1998 to commercialize the research conducted by Janos Hajto and co-workers on polymer materials. The company coined its name from fluorescent dye-doped polymers that absorb ambient light and re-emit a range of colours without the need for electrical power.

Freelight started to take off in 1999 when Brendan McGuckin, a former physicist and a commercialization manager at Napier, was appointed as chief executive. He secured £45 000 of funding from the Scottish Executive to further improve the company’s technology. He also commissioned market research to identify the priority markets for the technology.

“During a brain-storming session, we identified over 30 applications for the materials,” says McGuckin. “But it is vitally important for a small start-up to be focused.” As a result, the company discovered that the main market opportunity for the materials was as back-lights for electronic displays.

The company has now developed fully programmable prototype devices that emit red, green and blue light. Two selling points in the displays market are that the colours are not washed out, and that the devices consume less than 0.1% of the power of alternative technologies, such as light-emitting diodes. Freelight looks set to secure seed funding from both private and public investors by the end of the year.

Around the same time Freelight was set up, Jeff Wright was conducting research at Napier on organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). In 1998 he was awarded a one-year enterprise fellowship by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Scottish Enterprise to assess the opportunities of his research. On his doorstep, at Edinburgh University, was one of Europe’s foremost groups in the field of microdisplay devices and systems. Wright recognized the opportunity for OLED-inspired microdisplays in portable consumer electronics and formulated a business plan, largely by himself. Microemissive Displays was born. Wright then met Peter Denyer, the founder of Vision – a company that makes image sensors – at a meeting between enterprise fellows and investors. Denyer was impressed with what he saw and invested his own money in the company.

Microemissive attracted a further six-figure sum from Lothian Investment, which lured Ian Underwood and two of his former colleagues from Edinburgh University. The funding also allowed the company to develop very small full-colour high-resolution demonstration displays at the Scottish Microelectronics Centre in Edinburgh. “Having daily access to a full CMOS fabrication and post-wafer processing facilities worth £8m is a great advantage for a small company,” advocates Wright. The displays are used in conjunction with a lens to make the image appear larger, while keeping the manufacturing costs and power consumption down.

Microemissive is currently developing the manufacturing process and expects to have a full prototype later this year. The company recently secured £1.5m from 3i and currently employs 13 people.

Home advantage

With such a sound infrastructure in place, it is not surprising that new companies are spinning off from physics and engineering departments every month. And investors are buzzing round these start-ups like bees round a honey pot. “It’s a very dynamic environment to be in at the moment,” enthuses Brendan McGuckin chief executive of Freelight Systems, a spin-off company from Napier University.

John Marsh, chief research officer of Glasgow University spin-off Intense Photonics, believes that the optoelectronics companies in central Scotland benefit greatly by trading with each other: “It is important to outsource as much you can locally so that your own company can concentrate on building up its unique features.” Intense Photonics, for example, sends its semiconductor chips to Edinburgh-based Terahertz Photonics to be covered in a dielectric coating. However, Marsh points out that it is important for companies to see themselves as global: “If you think parochial, then you won’t succeed.”

The cluster effect attracts both money and people from all over the world. “People don’t mind relocating to an area like central Scotland where there are plenty of other optoelectronics companies,” says Frank Tooley, a physicist at Heriot Watt University and co-founder of Terahertz Photonics. “If one job does not work out, there are plenty of other opportunities.” However, with so many optoelectronics companies squeezed into the 70 km stretch between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Tooley adds that competition for experienced and skilled staff is fierce.

The thriving academic community has produced a large pool of graduates and postgraduates who have no trouble finding employment in Scotland and abroad. Ivan Andonovic of Strathclyde University and a founding member of Kamelian – a company that develops and manufactures high-performance “active” chips – also points to the benefits of having world-class research on the doorstep. Kamelian has recently teamed up with the Institute of Photonics at Strathclyde in a £750 000 government-backed project to develop new materials for the next generation of optoelectronics devices. “At this stage in the development of the company, we cannot be distracted from building the business by carrying out basic research,” Andonovic warns. The joint project means that Kamelian maintains a stake in research that might reap rewards in five years’ time. “It’s a brilliant way of working,” he enthuses.

But the advantages of being in Scotland are not all work related. The quality of life is a major attraction. Tooley has seen Scottish graduates who have spent several years abroad return home so that their children can be educated in Scotland. “It’s a nice place to live,” he adds. “I can be fishing in a loch all by myself within a 30 minute drive from Edinburgh. You cannot say the same for the south of England.”

Flowers of Scotland

There are more than 60 companies in the Scottish optoelectronics cluster. The biggest is Kymata – which designs and manufactures optical components for the telecommunications industry. The company, which was spun off from Southampton University in 1998, set up its global headquarters near Edinburgh a year later. Kymata has more than 250 employees and has raised over $162m of venture capital in the last two years – one of the largest finance deals for a company in the sector. Like Kymata, many of the other companies have grown from a twinkle in someone’s eye to the darling of the venture capitalists in under three years. How did they do it?

Frank Tooley of Terahertz Photonics always felt that there was more to life than teaching physics at Heriot Watt University and investigating optical interconnects, which was seen as blue-sky research at the time. A two-year stint at Bell Labs in the US, later followed by four years at McGill University in Canada, failed to satisfy his yearning to do something more relevant to everyday life. Back at Heriot Watt, Tooley and fellow physicist Gerald Buller approached the university with the idea of setting up a company to develop novel optoelectronics waveguides for the multibillion-dollar telecommunications market.

The university was incredibly supportive, recalls Tooley. His contract was initially modified so that he could spend one day a week working for the new company. He was also given access to lab space and equipment, and was sent on a variety of courses to learn about finance, intellectual property rights (IPR) and company law. When Terahertz secured £3m of funding from venture capitalists Scottish Equity Partners and ADD Partners last August, Tooley became the full-time chief technology officer. Heriot Watt assigned outright ownership of the IPR to the company in exchange for an undisclosed share in the equity.

Terahertz expects to move into new premises in the summer. Meanwhile, it pays commercial rates for the use of facilities and equipment at Heriot Watt. Currently the company employs 23 people, 20 of whom have PhDs in physics, electronic engineering, chemistry or optics. “Even the sales and marketing managers have PhDs,” says Tooley. By the end of the year, the workforce is expected to have grown to 60.

The company is also developing photonic integrated circuits – optical devices that contain waveguides, switches, filters and amplifiers on a single chip. “Most start-ups are formed round a single invention or technological process,” explains Tooley. “We are different because we combine our expertise in silica-on-silicon, polymer-on-silicon and semiconductor amplifiers.”

Creating networks

The last year has been a busy one for Ivan Andonovic, chief technology officer of Kamelian. In March 2000 he was asked to carry out some consultancy work in optical networks by Paul May, a founder and technical director of Cambridge Display Technology. “We discovered that we shared a vision for an optical-network business,” recalls Andonovic. By July Europe’s leading venture capitalists 3i had provided £1m of seed funding for the company to develop a business plan. And by November the company had secured £18m from 3i and Lightspeed, a US venture-capital company.

Andonovic attributes this meteoric rise to the strength of a team that includes a host of stars from the world of start-ups: May is now the chief executive officer; Tim Bestwick, a former director of technology strategy with Bookham Technology, is chief operating officer; and David Sibbald, founder of Atlantech Technologies, is non-executive director. “It is really important for academics to team up with people who have the business acumen and commercial nous,” advises Andonovic. “Our team made a real difference with the venture capitalists.”

Kamelian specializes in the design and fabrication of semiconductor optical amplifiers, which are expected to be one of the core components in future optical networks. “Our product has been driven by the market,” explains Andonovic. “Two years ago, our devices wouldn’t have been relevant. But they will be within the next six months.”

Currently the company is producing its first prototype chips at Compound Semiconductor Technologies and expects to have a qualified process later in the year.

For most start-up companies the hardest step is yet to come. Expanding a new business and making it a success in such a fiercely competitive industry will be tough. And there are bound to be losers as well as winners. Still tempted to set up your own company? “You must be willing to give up all your time,” warns Tooley. “Setting up a company is the hardest way to exploit your intellectual property. Ask yourself if you might be better suited to licensing your IPR or working as a consultant.”

“You need to have passion, confidence and to do your homework,” says Andonovic. “Team up with a business angel who has been through the whole process before you talk to venture capitalists. Otherwise you could lose everything.”

“It’s worth taking the risk though,” adds Tooley. “The payoff is huge if your company is a success. In a few years’ time you could be earning a lot of money.”

Particles for profits

So you think high-energy physics is an esoteric branch of science with little relevance to everyday life? Then you’re wrong. High-energy physics is, in fact, a hot bed of innovation. The tools that particle physicists have developed to recreate and probe the building blocks of matter have led to a wealth of applications in industry and medicine. That said, many of these spin-offs do not betray their origins in basic science. But that hasn’t stopped them from benefiting society.

The most famous and far-reaching example is undoubtedly the World Wide Web, invented at the CERN laboratory in Geneva by Tim Berners-Lee to help particle physicists handle and share experimental data. Particle physicists revel in its success. And rightly so – the Web has transformed the Internet from an academic tool into a telecommunications revolution. The Forrester Research organization predicts that the amount of “e-business” conducted over the Web will soar from $657bn in 2000 to $6800bn by 2004. And if that isn’t enough, the Internet is fuelling the boom in the optoelectronics industry – currently estimated to be worth $140bn and growing by 25% each year. And how much money does CERN make from this runaway success story? None.

Chris Jones, head of the technology-transfer service at CERN, explains that Berners-Lee took the deliberate decision to make his invention available free of charge to everyone. “The Web would never have happened if the lab had tried to exploit it,” he insists.

This “hands off” approach seems to encourage innovation in high-energy physics labs and in university departments (see box). A small number of companies have recently been spun off from CERN, but Jones attributes them to serendipity rather than a deliberate move by the lab. “Spin-offs have just happened when researchers with a good idea have met the right people,” he says. The main aim of technology transfer at CERN, says Jones, is to show that particle physics is relevant to the outside world, rather than to fund basic research.

One recent spin-off is Single Source, a Finnish company that sells software that was originally devised to manage documents and technical drawings for the Large Hadron Collider. The company was founded in 1997 by Ari-Pekka Hameri of the Helsinki Institute of Physics and seven co-workers from CERN. It now has more than 20 employees and over 20,000 people using its software. Hameri describes the company formation as a “Darwinian evolution” from the lab.

Much of the technology developed at CERN is too far from a commercial product for it be transferred directly to industry, explains Jones. That said, technology transfer happens naturally as companies and experimentalists work together to improve technology. Tony Wright is marketing director of Electron Tubes, a UK company that recently sold thousands of photomultipliers to the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California and the Borexino solar-neutrino detector at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy. Wright has first-hand experience of particle physicists. “They make impossible demands,” he says. “Current technology is not good enough for many particle-physics experiments.”

Electron Tubes had to supply the Borexino experiment with glass photomultiplier tubes that were essentially free from radioactive impurities. Such contaminants can easily swamp the tiny telltale signals produced by solar neutrinos. The difficulty is that natural potassium is a key ingredient in glass making, yet it contains a small amount of radioactive potassium-40. The company’s answer was to develop a new industrial glass-making process minus the potassium. “We certainly exploit some of these wacky ideas from particle physics,” adds Wright, pointing to the company’s range of radiopure light detectors for medical applications and radiation monitoring.

Theorists get in on the act

Particle theorist Christine Davies and her group at Glasgow University in the UK have recently teamed up with the aerospace and defence company BAe Systems to apply techniques from quantum-chromodynamics calculations to the design of ships.

The large number of radar antennae on modern ships causes a real problem for designers, who must minimize signal interference and reduce the risk to sailors from electromagnetic radiation. Currently engineers use a rule of thumb to find the best positions for the antennae. But BAe Systems recognized that a more scientific approach was needed to optimize radar coverage as the complexity of the resulting electromagnetic-field pattern increases.

Davies and her co-workers are experts in calculating the properties of particles and their interactions by splitting space-time into a lattice of points. Their calculations, which require huge amounts of computing power, involve inverting large matrices in record time. The Glasgow team is now applying exactly the same matrix-inversion technique to unravel the electromagnetic field on ships. The results are expected to show naval engineers where best to place the radar antennae.

Medical benefits

Medicine is one of the major beneficiaries of particle physics. Recent advances in accelerator technology, for example, now mean that hospitals can buy their own cyclotrons to manufacture radioisotopes for positron-emission-tomography scans, and other nuclear medicine, on an industrial scale. Ion Beam Applications – a spin-off from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium – currently supplies accelerators that are a few metres in diameter and can be operated without the intervention of specialist accelerator physicists. However, over 70% of the firm’s revenue comes from the sale of electron-beam accelerators that are used to sterilize medical instruments, pasteurize food and treat plastics. The company, which was founded in 1986, now has over 1100 employees worldwide and its sales in the first half of 2000 topped Euro 110m ($100m).

Meanwhile, positron emission tomography (PET) – which has its roots in particle physics – has saved countless lives and dispensed with the need for exploratory surgery in many cases. PET scanners work by detecting the gamma rays that are produced when a positron emitted by a radioisotope annihilates an electron.

Although PET scanners have been available for 30 years, the cost of conventional machines is prohibitive for many hospitals due to the expensive array of detectors and amplifiers that are needed to convert the gamma rays into an electronic signal. However, particle physicists are working in conjunction with both clinicians and industrial researchers to develop larger and cheaper gamma-ray detectors. Last year, for example, Bob Ott at the Institute of Cancer Research together with colleagues at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the Royal Marsden Hospital, all in the UK, developed an affordable large-scale gamma-ray detector. The device is based on the barium-fluoride crystals and wire chambers that are found in particle-physics experiments.

And last year Time magazine’s invention of the year was a new medical scanner that simultaneously combines images of the metabolic processes inside the body from PET with the detailed anatomical images from computerized-tomography scanners. The device was designed and built by former particle physicist David Townsend and his colleague Ronald Nutt, both now at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in the US. The combination scanner allows doctors to determine the location of a tumour much more precisely. Previously, doctors had to match up PET and CT scans by eye. In the US, increasing numbers of patients are routinely having PET scans. At over $2000 per scan, PET promises to be a big business in itself.

Spin-offs from future colliders

But the innovation doesn’t stop there. A huge amount of effort is being invested in the design of detectors that will measure up to the rigorous demands of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Due to come on line in 2005, the LHC will collide bunches of protons with energies of 7 TeV (7 × 1012 eV) every 25 ns. The detectors closest to the collision point have to withstand a harsh radiation environment, be capable of detecting a particle with pinpoint accuracy and spit out their data fast – very fast. The research and development that has been carried out on materials and electronics could lead to numerous spin-offs, ranging from low-dose digital dental-radiology detectors to new chip-packaging materials that can conduct away heat efficiently.

As soon as the experiments at the LHC begin recording collisions, data will pour out at a rate that is equivalent to a 1 km pile of CD ROMs every second. Particle physicists are currently building fast electronics that can filter information from the most interesting collisions, reducing the data by a factor of 109 in less than a microsecond. But that still leaves a lot of data to be analysed by thousands of physicists around the world. For this reason, particle physicists are developing the Grid – a way of harnessing the combined might of computers around the world to analyse the data. Indeed, they have already teamed up with computer companies – such as Compaq, IBM, Silicon Graphics and Sun – to speed up the infrastructure of the network. Moreover, they are developing software that will allow researchers to manipulate data at high speed across the network. The Grid is also expected to benefit astronomers and genome scientists, who also have to deal with vast quantities of data.

So, do you still think that high-energy physics is an esoteric branch of science with little relevance to everyday life? Thought not.

Physics goes commercial

Photo of a roll of banknotes
Show me the money.

Three-quarters of the people who call the Automobile Association don’t know where they are. It might sound amusing, but being lost isn’t much fun if your car has broken down in the middle of nowhere. Help, however, could be at hand thanks to a high-tech business set up in 1995 by Cambridge University physicist Peter Duffett-Smith. Drivers will soon be able to buy mobile phones containing software developed by his company that can pinpoint their position to within metres. Bingo! Your breakdown recovery service will be speeding its way to you in minutes.

What’s amazing is that the principle behind this “location-positioning” technology was developed by Duffett-Smith for entirely fundamental research – to study the radioemissions from distant galaxies. It’s an example of how even the most esoteric of research can have commercial potential. For the full story of how he moved into business, see page 32 (print version only).

Business is booming

Now is the ideal time for physicists who want to go into business. The economy is thriving. The Internet is growing at a frenzied rate. And the optoelectronics firms that supply the “picks and shovels” of the Internet gold rush are booming. Indeed, the global market for lasers, displays and fibre optics – all physics-based inventions – is worth over £140bn and expanding at some 25% a year.

Scotland, for example, has over 60 optoelectronics businesses, and new companies are being spun off from Scottish university departments every month. The opportunities in lasers and optics are enormous and so-called “photonic band-gap materials” – which might satisfy the demand for ever-faster optical communication – could be the next big thing. At least three new companies have already been set up recently to develop these materials (p39 and p40, print version only).

This special issue also contains advice for would-be entrepreneurs and guidance from experienced physicists who’ve been in business for years. Rule number one: recruit experienced managers who can help you to grow the business. There’s no point burning yourself out when others can do the legal, marketing or financial work better than you. Founding entrepreneurs often become chief technical officers, leaving the day-to-day running of the firm to the specialists – even if it means sharing the business. “It’s better to own a 10% share in a large company than a 100% share in a small one,” as one adviser to entrepreneurs puts it.

Communications skills are also fundamental. You can’t expect to raise finance from venture capitalists if you can’t explain your technology in a nutshell. As physicist Henry Yaffe, who founded Yafo Networks in 1999, points out, some venture capitalists don’t know “the difference between a photon and a futon” (p31, print version only).

You don’t even need to have years of experience to establish a business. The E Ink Corporation (p30, print version only), which makes erasable electronic displays, was set up by two 22-year-old American students just before they graduated. They raised $1 million within four months and are already selling their products.

If you’re after home-spun practical advice on how to succeed in business, then Bob Claridge – who has spent over 15 years working in physics-based companies – has the answers. His top tip: make sure your passport is up to date because you’ll need to sell your products abroad to survive.

And if the prospect of going in to business frightens you, relax – you don’t have to do it all alone. Most research universities worth their salt now have innovation companies that can guide you through the commercialization process and provide access to lawyers, patent agents and venture capitalists (p37, print version only).

From particles to profits

Without doubt the biggest spin off from physics has been the World Wide Web, which was developed at CERN. It has transformed our lives, and “e-business” is expected to soar ten-fold to $6800bn by 2004. But particle accelerators themselves are full of technological opportunities for business, including photomultiplier tubes and superconducting magnets. Indeed, business opportunities for physicists are everywhere – including space science (p43, print version only), imaging and sensors (p46, print version only). Even nanotechnology – which has promised much, but delivered little so far – is getting in on the act (p42, print version only).

The time is ripe for going into business. Of course, it’s tough and a good portfolio of intellectual property rights is vital – if only to impress potential investors. But the financial rewards are high and there’s the thrill of seeing your idea becoming reality.

We conclude by looking at some physics-based companies that have thrived despite all the odds – including Psion, the computing firm set up by the physicist David Potter in 1980. He certainly thinks physicists have what it takes. “Physics teaches hard, abstract, logical thinking, which is exactly what one needs in industry,” says Potter. “I would encourage any physicist who is thinking of going into business to do so.”

Shedding new light on an old effect

Now Troy Stevens and co-workers at the University of Michigan in the US and the Max Planck Institute of Solid State Physics in Stuttgart, Germany, have shown that Cerenkov radiation can also be emitted by electric dipoles moving slower than the speed of light (T Stevens et al. 2001 Science 291 627).

In their recent work, Stevens and co-workers studied the radiation emitted by a spatially extended collection of electric dipoles, rather than a point particle. They created the trail of dipoles by injecting a laser pulse into a zirconium-selenide crystal 5 mm long.

But nature rarely gives a clear-cut answer and several theoretical issues remain. In the April issue of Physics World, Georgy N Afanasiev of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Dubna, Russia, explains why he believes Cerenkov radiation is so fundamental and worthy of urgent research.

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