Skip to main content

Reset your password

Please enter the e-mail address you used to register to reset your password

Note: The verification e-mail to change your password should arrive immediately. However, in some cases it takes longer. Don't forget to check your spam folder.

If you haven't received the e-mail in 24 hours, please contact customerservices@ioppublishing.org

Registration complete

Thank you for registering with Physics World
If you'd like to change your details at any time, please visit My account

Close
Home » Page 1942

UK plans £65m facility

The UK at present has no nuclear physics facilities of its own, and very little investment in facilities overseas. “SIRIUS would open up many opportunities in a number of areas, most notably in materials science and nuclear astrophysics, ” says Bill Gelletly, the Surrey University physicist who is SIRIUS project scientist. SIRIUS may also have bio-medical applications, such as the production of long-lived species that could be injected into the body as tracers.

SIRIUS would produce radioactive nuclei by focusing a 100 µA beam of 800 MeV protons from the synchrotron at ISIS onto a heavy metal target. Radioactive nuclei produced in these collisions would then be separated and “re-accelerated” to higher energies. The SIRIUS plans allow for several low-energy beams (below 1 MeV per nucleon) and a high-energy beam. A superconducting linear accelerator would be used to re-accelerate nuclei to 10 MeV per nucleon.

SIRIUS project manager Hywel Price says that the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and other funding bodies will have to look at SIRIUS in a European context. “I am optimistic that there will be a European radioactive beam facility, but whether it’s in the UK remains to be seen, ” he says. Since France, Germany and Italy may prefer to upgrade their existing facilities, the construction of SIRIUS would depend on the merits of using ISIS over other beam technologies. “The UK is very short of major facilities, ” says Gelletly. “My belief is that SIRIUS represents a first-class opportunity for the UK to create a world-class facility. We should grab it.”

US tops research league table

Germany has a much less even pattern of citation than the US or England, with strengths in certain core fields, including physical sciences, maths and engineering, and weaknesses in economics and social science. France also performs well in engineering – despite a relatively modest output of papers – and is strong in applied maths and physics.

When the subjects are grouped into 13 “superclusters” of similar disciplines, the authors found that England comes second or third in ten of the 13 areas. England excels in biological and pre-clinical sciences, where it lies only just behind the US. It is also strong in the physical sciences – defined as physics, chemistry and materials science – coming consistently third, just behind Canada. The one area where England scores poorly is engineering, where it trails below the world average well behind France and Germany.

The study was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which spends £804m a year on research in English universities. Most of the money goes to pay for academic salaries, laboratories, libraries and major pieces of equipment. Funding for specific projects comes from the UK’s research councils. The council is now asking English universities whether the results of the survey should be used to channel more money into under-performing areas or whether it should be used to boost existing strengths.

Citation surveys like this are controversial, and were not used by HEFCE when it last monitored the quality of UK research in 1996 ( Physics World January 1997). However, Sir Robert May, chief scientific adviser to the UK government, points out in his introduction to the survey that the latest results are similar to those in a separate analysis carried out by the Office of Science and Technology last year ( Physics World March 1997).

Physics fails to keep pace in the UK

Most of the extra money – £300m over three years – will go on a £600m Joint Infrastructure Fund that the government is setting up with the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest biomedical research charity. The Wellcome Trust has also promised £110m towards the cost of a synchrotron radiation source called DIAMOND, and the government is chipping in another £35m in the next three years. DIAMOND is also the first central facility to have its own line in the science budget. The government has also earmarked £15m in both 2000 and 2001 to cover currency fluctuations in the cost of the UK’s subscription to international organizations such as CERN and the European Space Agency.

“The overall allocation is designed to be a balanced package with particular attention to boosting postgraduate and post-doctoral training and development, plus high priority areas, while still maintaining the underlying scientific disciplines across the sectors, ” said Lord Sainsbury, the UK’s science minister earlier today.

“The main advantage of today’s announcement to the research councils is that we can plan three years ahead, ” said Steve Mee, a spokesperson for PPARC. However, today’s figures do not include any details on which type of science laboratories will be refurbished first through the new £600 m DTI Welcome Trust infrastructure fund.

Ian Halliday, chief executive of PPARC, said that “compared to the decline we previously faced, we shall be able to maintain in real terms the level of our university research activity.” He added that PPARC intended to use some of its money to develop new support programmes for young and mid-career scientists who want to carry out “risky” research.

Quantum teleportation goes beyond two states

In quantum teleportation the quantum state of an object held by “Alice” is instantaneously sent to “Bob”. The technique works by sending one half of an “entangled” light beam to Alice and the other to Bob. Alice measures the interaction of this beam with the beam she wants to teleport. She sends that information to Bob who uses it make an identical copy of the beam that Alice wanted to teleport. This original beam is lost in the progress.

In the experiment – performed by physicists from CalTech in the US, Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Wales in Bangor – Alice used a 50/50 beam-splitter to combine the output of a titanium sapphire laser with her half of the entangled beam from an optical parametric oscillator. Alice then measured both outputs from the beam-splitter and transmitted the results to Bob. Bob was then able to use this information and his half of the entangled beam to create an exact copy of Alice’s original beam.

Previously only two-state quantum systems – such as the polarization of a photon – had been teleported. This new research should allow all quantum states to be teleported. “[This could] allow quantum systems to perform information-processing tasks that would be impossible in a classical world, ” according to Carlton Caves from the University of New Mexico.

Microsoft’s war cry for science investment

Myhrvold confirms the link between basic research and profit by pointing out that technology companies founded in the last 30 years that rely on basic research carried out since the second World War now have a market value of over a trillion dollars. He also criticizes certain “misconceptions” that exist about long-term research in industry. For example, he writes, although Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center is often considered a failure because the company failed to capitalise on the invention of the graphical user interface at the Palo Alto lab, profits from laser printers – also discovered there – have more than covered the cost of research at the company.

“There is no useless research”

Myhrvold is most worried the decreasing investment by both industrial companies and governments in high-risk basic research. Governments in particular, he says, “should consider longer time scales [50-100 years] and make investments accordingly. Even the most hard-nosed politician should realize that supporting science makes money and brings very tangible non-monetary benefits.”

Why some papers last longer that others

The survey was carried out by using the Science Citation Index to count the number of citations received by papers published in 1954 volume of the Astrophysical Journal in each of the 40 following years. The same was done for papers published in the January 1959 issue of Physics Review over a 30-year period. Abt then repeated this procedure for papers published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Journal of Geophysical Research, and the Reports section of Science in 1959.

Abt found that papers published in the Physical Review had a half-life of just 10.6 years, significantly shorter than the Astrophysical Journal. He suggests that main reason for this is that astronomy has been growing more rapidly than physics in the past few decades. For example, the number of papers published in the Astrophysical Journal increased from 165 papers in 1954 to 1812 in 1994 – a growth factor of 11. When Abt added a correction factor to account for the growth rates in different subjects he found that the half-lifes became much shorter – 5.9 years in physics and 8.0 years in astronomy. Within astronomy he found that observational papers had much longer half-lives than theoretical papers. Abt also found that long papers tend to be cited more than shorter one. In physics the average number of citations received in 30 years is 7.4 + 6.7x(the number of pages).

Gamma-ray bursts spring more surprises

There are a number of reasons why GRB980425 is associated with SN1998bw. Both occurred at the same time, at the same location and in the same direction as each other. SN1998bw is also a rare Type Ib/c supernova instead of the more common Type I or Type II explosions. Furthermore, material from the supernova was ejected at significantly higher speeds than standard supernove explosions.

As material from the explosion was ejected, it pushed a shock wave into the local stellar medium. The shocked material then amplified local magnetic fields which, in turn, accelerated the local electrons. This caused the electrons to emit synchrotron radiation. According to the researchers, the first synchrotron radiation produced was in the gamma-ray part of the spectrum, with the radio waves being emitted later as the shock wave slowed down. However, the researchers admit that if the radio emissions are in the form of jets, they may have overestimated the energy of the shock wave, which might cast doubt on the supernova/gamma-ray burst connection.

Physics solves blood vessel mystery

Experiments on the effect have been performed by introducing a compound called angiotensin II into the blood stream of a rat. This compound narrows the diameter of the blood vessels, which increases the blood pressure and leads to the formation of the “sausage-string” pattern in the blood vessels. If the angiotensin II is removed, the blood vessel returns to its previous shape. Gustafsson’s group suggests that the shape of the blood vessel becomes unstable at high blood pressure if the inner radius of the vessel becomes perturbed.

Gustafsson and co-workers defined a quantity, I(r), in terms of the dimensions and elastic properties of the vessels. If I(r) is positive, then the stress on the vessel increases in such a way to keep the blood vessel cylindrical in shape. However, if I(r) is negative, the radius of the vessel at that point becomes smaller, increasing the pressure and causing blood to flow away from this region. This further reduces the radius, eventually leading to the “sausage-string” pattern in the vein. According to their equations, the length of each “sausage” should be 5-10 times the radius of the vessel, which is backed up by experimental evidence. The theory also explains why similar patterns are not seen in larger blood vessels.

Quantum physics breakthrough wins Nobel Prize

Two of the physicists, Horst L. Störmer from Columbia University, New York, and Daniel C. Tsui, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, discovered the effect – called the fractional quantum Hall effect – in 1982. Robert B. Laughlin at Stanford University, California, explained their results one year later.

The Hall effect was discovered in 1879. This states that when a thin sheet of conducting material is place perpendicular to a magnetic field, an electric current following along the sheet causes a potential difference at right angles to both the current and the magnetic field. When the sheet is observed at low temperatures, the integer quantum Hall effect (discovered in 1980), becomes apparent. The resistence of the sheet now varies in a step-wise fashion as the field is increased. Störmer and Tsui discovered when they studied this effect below 1 Kelvin and with a magnetic field of 20 Telsa, the resistence acts in a similar fashion, but with more and more new steps. This was completely at odds with what condensed matter physicists expected.

According to Laughlin, electrons trapped in a strong magnetic field condense into a exotic new collective state, a quantum fluid, similar to the way in which collective states form in superfluid helium. A quantum of magnetic flux and an electron exist as a quasiparticle that carries the electric current. In Laughlin’s theory, the denominator is always odd, so quasiparticles can carry one-third, one-fifth, one-seventh – of the charge on an electron.

Laughlin said that he heard he had won in a pre-dawn telephone call from Stockholm. “I went completely bananas and then after I got over the shock I brewed a cup of coffee, ” he told NBC television. “I am hoping to use this as a soapbox to tell people how really fantastic nature is and to drive home the idea that there are new things in the world all over the place if you only have eyes to see them.” he said.

Physicists win Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Understanding how molecules behave on the quantum level can help develop new drugs or improve the synthesis of chemical products. However, the underlying mathematics behind quantum chemistry are exceedingly complex.

Density-functional theory simplifies the mathematics surrounding the behaviour of electrons in a molecule. Instead of having to calculate the position and motion of every electron in the molecule, Kohn proved that the total energy of a molecule can be found by calculating the average number of electrons in a given orbit space – the electron density. This allows chemists to model on the properties of large molecules such as enzymes.

John Pople developed the GAUSSIAN computer program that exploits quantum mechanics to describe the physical properties of chemical bonds. Chemists input the properties of molecules or a chemical reaction, and the program calculates the possible chemical reactions or the behaviour of molecules as a result. By basing the program on a modular design, the program can be updated easily with the latest theoretical research.

Copyright © 2026 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors