Page 726 – Physics World

Home » Page 726

Protest-hit Thirty Meter Telescope receives construction go-ahead in Hawaii

Construction of the long-delayed $1.4bn Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is set to soon begin after it was issued with a formal “notice to proceed” from the state of Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR). The move marks a fresh chapter in the struggle between the international astronomical community and local Hawaiian activists, who claim that telescopes on the 4207 m-high site on Mauna Kea interfere with traditional cultural and religious practices. However, despite receiving the green light, protesters have indicated that they will continue to demonstrate against the project.

The TMT, whose primary mirror consists of 492 segments of glass pieced together, promises resolution more than 12 times sharper than images from the Hubble Space Telescope. The project originated in 2003 when Californian and Canadian universities merged three existing telescope projects to form the TMT Observatory Corporation. By 2009 an initial design had been accepted and Mauna Kea was selected as the site (see timeline below). In 2015, however, the Hawaii Supreme Court revoked the building permit following activists’ protests against construction.

In October 2018, the state Supreme Court issued a new permit for the construction of the TMT, in exchange for the closure of five of the 13 telescopes already on the site as well as the restoration of the ground they occupy to a natural state. The notice to proceed by the DLNR now allows the project to go ahead. “We remain committed to being good stewards of Mauna Kea, and to honouring and respecting the culture and traditions of Hawaii,” notes Henry Yang, chair of the TMT International Observatory’s board of governors.

Speaking out

While local officials tore down a group of protesters’ shacks and monuments on the site after the verdict, TMT officials have not yet determined exactly when construction will start. “We would like to begin construction as soon as possible and will meet with University of Hawaii [which subleases the Mauna Kea site], as well as state and county officials soon to determine an exact and appropriate start date,” says TMT spokesperson Scott Ishikawa, who adds that they will determine an updated cost for the project “once on-site construction officially begins”.

Thirty Meter Telescope project clears latest legal hurdle

Hawaii's supreme court has ruled that construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope can go ahead

The TMT’s timeline envisions first light for the observatory in July 2027. However, activists who delayed the project in 2015 have made it clear that they will not back down from continued protests at the site. Indeed, the state’s governor, David Ige, promised to respect the rights and cultural traditions of Hawaiians, including the right to speak out against the observatory.

Timeline: ups and down of the Thirty Metre Telescope

2004 Project office for the $1bn Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) is established

2007 The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation pledges $200m to the TMT

2009 Mauna Kea in Hawaii is selected as the site for the TMT

2013 Hawaiian environmental officials give permission for the construction of the TMT

2014 Construction of the TMT begins following the approval of a sublease by the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR)

2015 Construction is halted after protests by native Hawaiians.

2016 Hawaii’s Supreme Court rules that the construction permit for the TMT is invalid while TMT officials choose the Canary Islands as an alternative site for the planned telescope if construction does not go ahead in Hawaii

2017 The BLNR grants a construction permit for the TMT following the recommendation by a senior judge

2018 Hawaii’s Supreme Court rules that construction of the TMT can begin

2019 Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources issues the TMT with a formal “notice to proceed”

Once a physicist: Ben Cowie

What sparked your initial interest in physics?

I was initially interested in medical physics as an undergraduate, as our campus at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, had a nuclear reactor on site. I ended up studying isotope geochemistry of light stable elements, which isn’t too far from the medical-isotope field.

What did your degrees focus on, and did you ever consider a permanent academic career?

Following an undergraduate degree in geophysics and earth sciences, I went on to receive my PhD in geochemistry from the University of Calgary, in 2013. I did pursue an academic career for a few years, as a postdoctoral fellow, and later a research assistant, at Harvard University, in earth history and science. My research ranged from applied questions regarding pollution and hydrogeology, to working with NASA on planetary exploration missions, to basic questions such as “How do we make higher-precision measurements on difficult rare isotopes?”

How did you get interested in public transport and urban cycling?

Throughout grad school we all rode bikes and took the bus because it was cheap, and we were all poor! By the time I had a little more money, those habits had already stuck. I realized it was mostly about my personal health and the pleasure that riding my bike to work every day brought me. Even in the winters on the Canadian Prairie, riding a bike brought me happiness. That’s why I still do it today. And I realized that I want to give people the tools to get around the city comfortably by bike, and to share my knowledge of urban cycling.

What were some of the challenges in moving from physics to setting up a specialist shop like London Bicycle Cafe?

So many things. I knew very little about things like real estate, marketing and finance, which are all essential for good business. But I had great coaches and we recruited amazing staff. I thought that if I could learn and discover new things in science, running a business couldn’t be that hard, could it? It turns out that a bit of happy ignorance and hard work goes a long way.

What’s it like day-to-day, running the bike café?

During our busy season it’s a little bit of everything. I’m pulling shots of espresso in the mornings, working on bikes and doing some sales in the afternoons, maybe squeaking in some time for marketing or social media in there somewhere. When you run a small business you’re all the jobs: chief of accounting, sales, service and sanitation.

How has your physics background been helpful in this work, if at all?

The answer is always maths, and writing. I’m pretty sure we have a more sophisticated business model than businesses larger than us, and writing proposals to business financing entities is way easier than writing grants to the National Science Foundation. Having a quantitative background helps make your business case much stronger than those without.

Any advice for today’s students?

Follow your heart. My business is more about having an opportunity to live in the same city as my partner and be close to my family, than anything else. As much as I love what I do for work, it doesn’t feel as important as other things in my life. Science always feels more important than it probably is, and developing your life outside your job is essential, too.

Ben Cowie can be contacted via e-mail at ben@londonbicyclecafe.com

SNMMI Annual Meeting showcases nuclear medicine innovation

The Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) Annual Meeting took place this week in Anaheim, CA. Here are some selected research highlights from this year’s conference.

Interim scan helps guide prostate cancer therapy

Researchers at Technical University Munich have shown that adding an interim scan during prostate cancer therapy can help guide treatment. They found that PSMA (prostate-specific membrane antigen) PET imaging of patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) after two cycles of ¹⁷⁷Lu-PSMA radioligand therapy has a significant predictive value for patient survival.

Monitoring radioligand therapy — ⁶⁸Ga-PSMA11 PET images at baseline and after two cycles of ¹⁷⁷Lu-PSMA radioligand therapy in a patient with mCRPC. (Courtesy: Andrei Gafita, Matthias Eiber, TUM School of Medicine, Klinikum rechts der Isar)

In phase 2 trials, ¹⁷⁷Lu-PSMA therapy has shown promise for treating mCRPC patients. The therapy typically involves a preliminary PSMA PET scan to identify eligible patients. But while interim PET scans have shown high predictive value for lymphoma patients, this concept has not yet been explored in prostate cancer patients undergoing ¹⁷⁷Lu-PSMA therapy.

The retrospective analysis, conducted at Klinikum rechts der Isar, included patients who underwent ⁶⁸Ga-PSMA11 PET/CT at baseline and after two cycles of ¹⁷⁷Lu-PSMA therapy. The researchers used in-house developed software, qPSMA, to evaluate the whole-body tumour burden.

“Tumour response was assessed by the changes in PSMA-avid tumour volume from baseline to the second PSMA PET using three classification methods,” explains first author Andrei Gafita. “We found that tumour response assessed on interim PSMA PET after two radioligand therapy cycles was associated with overall survival. While further analyses involving clinical parameters are warranted, this analysis paves the way for use of interim PSMA PET in a prospective setting during ¹⁷⁷Lu-PSMA radioligand therapy.”

Early biomarker reveals degenerative neurologic disease

A multicentre study has revealed how a novel radioligand can differentiate progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) from similar brain disorders. PSP can be difficult to diagnose as its symptoms are often similar to those of Parkinson’s disease and dementia. These latest findings enable earlier and more reliable diagnosis of this rare brain disorder.

“Currently, PSP can only be definitively diagnosed post-mortem by examining region-specific tau deposits in the brain,” explains Matthias Brendel from LMU Munich. “Future interventional trials targeting tau in PSP would strongly benefit from biomarkers to validate the specific presence of the tau deposits and to monitor treatment response during therapy.”

PSP biomarker — ¹⁸F-PI-2620 binding from averaged groups of PSP-RS (upper row) and healthy controls (lower row), depicted upon an MRI template. (Courtesy: M Brendel, H Barthel, T Van Eimeren *et al*)

The researchers evaluated patients with suspected tau pathology in clinically diagnosed PSP. They performed PET using the radioligand ¹⁸F-PI-2620 on 17 patients with probable or possible PSP, along with 10 healthy controls and seven disease control patients with multi-system atrophy, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease.

They observed a significantly elevated mean ¹⁸F-PI-2620 standardized uptake value (SUV) ratio in the brain’s globus pallidus and substantia nigra areas in PSP patients compared with the healthy group. In contrast, the disease control group had similar or only slightly elevated SUV ratios when compared with the healthy group.

“My colleagues and I were able to detect an elevated signal in the majority of evaluated PSP patients and could clearly discriminate the PSP group from healthy controls and disease controls,” says Brendel. “Importantly, PSP patients at early disease stages also revealed an elevated PI-2620 signal, which points at the suitability of this ligand as an early PSP biomarker.”

Dosimetry vest personalizes ¹⁷⁷Lu-DOTATATE therapy

Researchers at the University of Washington are developing a multi-detector personalized home dosimetry vest that collects data to individualize therapy for patients with neuroendocrine tumours (NETs).

Targeted therapy using ¹⁷⁷Lu-DOTATATE greatly increases progression-free survival for patients with metastatic, somatostatin-receptor-2 positive NETs. In the USA, however, patients receive a standardized protocol of four 200 mCi doses, regardless of size or weight. This is safe for the vast majority of patients, but less than optimal for most.

Studies in Europe have shown that tailoring the number of doses based upon toxicity to organs-at-risk (OARs) can more than double survival for such NET patients. Traditionally, this organ dosimetry involves longitudinal imaging sessions over seven days – an expensive approach that is burdensome to the patient. The researchers hope that their wearable monitor will let patients track radiotracer washout at home, enabling personalized ¹⁷⁷Lu-DOTATATE therapies in the USA and lowering the cost of treatment personalization worldwide.

“We propose to create a lightweight, low-cost, wearable, patient-specific technology that will allow organ-specific measurements to be made within the comfort of the patient’s home,” explains first author Robert Miyaoka. “The garment will house 15–20 small radiation detectors, strategically placed within the vest based upon the patient’s own anatomy. In addition, the vest will be coupled to a compact electronics pack that will acquire data and send them to a secure website, where medical personnel/software can check the data for quality control in near real-time.”

The patient will wear the vest for a two-minute data acquisition once a day for between seven and 21 days. These measurements, together with a single SPECT/CT image taken 24 hours after ¹⁷⁷Lu-DOTATATE administration, will provide dosimetry for all of the patient’s OARs, enabling physicians to tailor the number of treatments based upon personalized dosimetry.

“Preliminary vest results from simulations show that at-home vest measurements made over 7–21 days can provide organ-specific washout rates with precision as good or better than the current accepted gold standard of three to four quantitative SPECT/CT images acquired over seven days,” says Miyaoka.

PET/CT provides earlier diagnosis of tuberculosis

Molecular imaging with ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT can evaluate tuberculosis, identifying diseased areas and providing valuable information to guide therapy. While tuberculosis most frequently involves the lungs, involvement of other tissues and organs – referred to as extra-pulmonary tuberculosis – presents a particular challenge as the disease site is often not accessible for diagnosis.

“In our study, we aimed to evaluate the utility of ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT in the initial diagnosis and response assessment of patients with extra-pulmonary tuberculosis,” explains Bhagwant Mittal from the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education & Research in India.

Tuberculosis diagnostics — (A–C) Baseline ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT study of a patient with vertebral lesions; (D–F) two-month follow-up study showing favourable response to therapy; (G–I) PET/CT at treatment completion, showing complete metabolic response to therapy. (Courtesy: B R Mittal, A S Parihar, A Sood *et al*)

Mittal and collaborators examined 93 patients with extra-pulmonary tuberculosis. Patients underwent ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT as a baseline prior to treatment, and then received follow-up imaging after two months and after treatment completion.

The baseline scans detected 176 lesion sites among the 93 participants. In two-month follow-up scans on 47 patients, 21.2% had complete metabolic response (no abnormal lesions), 72.3% had residual disease (persistent lesions, but no new lesions) and 6.4% had disease progression (new lesions). A final scan conducted on 28 patients showed that 28.6% had complete metabolic response, 53.6% showed residual disease and 17.8% had disease progression.

“This study has the potential to change the way we manage tuberculosis patients,” says Mittal. “Our results show that ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT provides a whole-body survey and identifies the disease sites in various organs and tissues in a single study. This helps to provide an early estimation of disease extent, and in suspected cases, helps to identify accessible biopsy sites for obtaining tissue diagnosis. Further, follow-up scans can point towards response to treatment and thus suggest predict a more accurate outcome.”

How to look for signs of life on a planet 40 light-years away

From AbSciCon 2019 in Bellevue, Washington

Tuesday was the second day of the Astrobiology Science Conference 2019 (AbSciCon 2019) here in the Pacific Northwest, and by now everyone has their bearings. There was a sense that today everyone got down to business.

Like any big conference, the attendees here fall into groups. There are the old-timers and leading lights who know their stuff and act much like directors in a corporation. There are the workers – hard core scientists, postdocs and graduate students who are neck deep designing a new instrument, a new computer model or the next telescope. They seem to understand everything. Then there are undergraduates fascinated by space exploration, looking to find a way into this rapidly expanding field. The latter tend to travel in flocks, their mentors never far away.

The field of astrobiology is still profoundly new. The first confirmed exoplanets were discovered in 1992, and over 4000 are now known, with more found nearly every day. Today Karl Stapelfeldt, chief scientist of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program (now that is a sweet position) said the pace is doubling every two and a half years.

Plethora of new missions

A dozen missions, real or conceptual, must have been mentioned on Tuesday. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) designed to replace the Hubble Space Telescope, has a current launch date of 30 March 2021. But many here are thinking hard about what comes after the JWST. NASA’s Decadal Survey is starting now, where the scientific community identifies questions, and answering observations, they’d like over the next 10 years or more. Several missions were introduced and discussed here today, all with singular capabilities in various wavelength bands. These include the Origins Space Telescope; the LIFE Mission; LUVOIR-A and LUVOIR-B; HabEX with its unique stellar occulter or “starshade”; the LYNX mission to replace the Chandra X-ray Observatory; and more.

Where will these missions be looking? Everyone’s favourite planetary system to explore, and I do mean everyone, is the TRAPPIST-1 system, located about 40 light-years away. There, seven known planets orbit a cool, “M dwarf” star that is only slightly larger than Jupiter. It is worth mentioning that about 75% of the stars in our neighbourhood are M dwarfs. Because all seven planets transit their star – pass between it and us – we know their average densities. They all seem to have a rocky composition, like the four inner planets in our own solar system. Three of these distant planets are thought to be in their star’s habitable zone, where water could exist as a liquid, considered necessary (but not sufficient) for life – or at least life as we know it here on Earth.

The big idea – but hardly the only one — is to capture the spectra of a transiting exoplanet’s atmosphere as its star’s light passes through it to us. If you think of the “thin blue line” that is our own atmosphere as seen from space, only about 100 km wide, you can begin to grasp the intricate design and subtlety involved in viewing an atmosphere from 400 trillion km. Signals are small, and many transits will be needed. The captured spectra will be analysed for signs of gases like carbon dioxide, water vapour, methane, oxygen and ozone. These might indicate that some form of life exists on a planet – or past life, or an ocean, or the loss of an ocean. As you can imagine, proposals to make such measurements require a great deal of thought, planning, physics, planetary science and computer modelling.

The conference continues until Friday.

Lindau 2019: the chance to pick a Nobel laureate’s brain

Summer is in full swing in Bavaria. The beer gardens are full and flowing with weißbier and Aperol spritzers. It’s hard not be swept along by the holiday vibe.

In Lindau, however, a team are furiously busy, preparing to welcome 39 Nobel laureates and 580 young scientists to the 69th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. On Saturday, I will be jumping on a train to join them in the picture-postcard town – also an island – at the edge of Lake Constance in Germany’s far south.

The focus of the annual meeting is rotated and, this year, it’s physics’ turn. Attendees include Nobel new kids Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou, who shared the 2018 prize for their pioneering work in laser physics. Illustrious regulars have included Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac.

A changing mission

When the meetings started in 1951, the organizers’ aim was to undo the isolation of German scientists that occurred in the Nazi era. Today, it’s still very much about bringing scientists together, but its reason for being has switched to nurturing conversations between different generations of scientists.

“The main goal of these meetings is to bring together young scientists with Nobel laureates,” says Rainer Blatt, this year’s scientific co-lead and professor at the Institute of Experimental Physics in Innsbruck, Austria. “In close encounters with them, the young scientists have the opportunity to learn first-hand from the laureates and get inspired.”

Making sure that the most talented minds can attend, wherever they are from, is also central to the meeting ethos. This year, young scientists are travelling from 89 countries and include the first from the Dominican Republic and Mozambique. All under 35, they are undergraduates, PhD students and post-docs. To win one of the highly coveted spots, outstanding achievement in academia and research is a prerequisite.

Many attendees go on to great things, says Nadine Gärber, who is head of Young Scientist Support and Academic Partner Relations. They include Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, a biochemist and the Portuguese Minister for Education, and German astronaut Alexander Gerst.

Alexander Gerst on the International Space Station — Alexander Gerst sends a message from the International Space Station (Courtesy: ESA/Lindau)

A geophysicist by training, Gerst sent greetings to the 2014 meeting from the International Space Station 400 kilometres above the Earth. It was the most moving Lindau moment for Gärber, a Lindau local who has worked on the meetings for 15 years. “He attended the Lindau Meeting the year before and brought his name badge on board the ISS and showed it to the camera,” she says. “It was broadcast during the opening ceremony and I was so overwhelmed.”

The meeting programme is unlike that of a typical scientific conference. To encourage more relaxed, face-to-face conversations between the young scientists and the laureates, it includes cosy lunches, afternoon strolls and, for a select few, the both fabulous and sweaty-palm-inducing opportunity to present their research to a laureate in a Master Class.

Lindau is not, however, just about the science. A chunk is devoted to careers, issues affecting research, and science and scientists’ role in society. I’m particularly looking forward to a discussion of the threat of nationalism (Br*xit, anyone?) to international collaborations in science.

Not listed on the programme is the undeniably special atmosphere, which I experienced first-hand last year. It bubbles with the enthusiasm of the young scientists. “(It) sweeps me away year after year,” says Gärber. I’m looking forward to sharing the experience with you next week – stay tuned!

Many of the meetings’ previous lectures and discussions, including audio recordings from the 1950s, are available via the Lindau Meeting website.

50th anniversary of Apollo 11 – hidden stories

In July the world will be celebrating 50 years since Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong took those historic first steps on the Moon. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester looks back at some of the lesser known stories from the Apollo era.

Glester catches up with Kevin Fong, presenter of 13 Minutes to the Moon, the BBC podcast exploring the final dramatic 13-minute descent of the Apollo 11 mission, when everything came close to going badly wrong. Fong explains why the Apollo rockets’ guidance systems were so ground-breaking at the time. He also describes the extraordinary psychology of the Apollo astronauts who risked their lives in the pursuit of progress.

Next up, Alan Andres speaks about Chasing the Moon, the book he co-authored with Robert Stone that has been turned into a PBS documentary. He discusses the complex dual life lived by Wernher von Braun, Nazi scientist-turned NASA rocket pioneer. Andres also explains why James Webb, the American government official who oversaw NASA from 1961 to 1968, left such a lasting legacy on the US education system.

Glester also visits the Cheltenham Science Festival in the UK where he catches up with a trio of Apollo aficionados. Science presenter Dallas Campbell shares some of his favourite stories including the surprising modest origins of the US flag that was planted into the lunar surface. Astronomer Nick Howes speaks about the social value of the Apollo programme and why we need to recapture the era’s spirit of adventure. While geoscientist Louise Alexander explains why it is still worth analysing samples of lunar rock returned during the Apollo missions.

Finally, you can hear an archive interview with Apollo astronaut Alan Bean, who went to the Moon on Apollo 12. Since retiring, Bean developed a passion for painting and creates works inspired by his adventures in space. This pursuit brought Bean the freedom of expression he never had as an astronaut where speed of thought and precision were among the required skills.

In the July episode of Physics World Stories, Glester will look forward to some of the missions that will see humans (and machines) return to our nearest celestial neighbour. Also look out for the July issue of Physics World magazine, a special issue devoted to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

Renewables in the UK: what next?

Renewables now supply around 33% of UK electricity, but the regional inputs per capita are very uneven. Most of the 43 GW or so of UK renewable capacity is in England – more than 25 GW, led by wind and biomass. But in 2017 Scotland, with 7.5% of the total UK population, got 68% of its power from its 10.5 GW of renewables, with 73% of that coming from wind. Around 12 GW more is on the way, so Scotland may yet meet its ambitious 100% by 2020 power target.

Wales, with about 4.5% of the total UK population, received the equivalent of 48% of its electric power from 3.2 GW of renewables in 2017. The devolved Welsh Government wants to see that rise to 70% by 2030. And it could get to 100% by 2035, according to the Institute of Welsh Affairs, with 4 GW of tidal, wave, and floating wind, 2.7 GW of photovoltaics (PV), 2.5 GW of wind onshore, and 1.7 GW offshore, plus smaller inputs from biomass/biogas and mini hydro.

Northern Ireland, home to around 2.9% of the UK population, had 1.6 GW of renewables in 2017, supplying 20% of its power. Of that 1.6 GW, 82% came from wind, with some hoping that Northern Ireland can get to 40% renewables by 2020, and 70% by 2030.

There are no comparable percentage statistics or targets for how much of England’s electricity supply comes from renewables, at least I can’t find any. In most official statistics England is lumped in with Wales or as part of the UK or Britain. From what I can tell from what’s available, England gets around 20% of its power from renewables. It’s hard to be exact since, amongst other things, it imports power from Scotland.

According to BEIS data, in 2017 Scotland generated 51.7% of total UK renewable electricity, with Northern Ireland providing 34%, England 26% and Wales 20%.

While, combined, the UK is doing quite well on power, the English share per capita is low. And even getting to that has been a struggle — one that’s continuing, with new onshore wind projects still blocked across the UK by the Westminster government, apart from on remote Scottish Islands. The UK government says it has to avoid passing large costs on to consumers and so has cut support for renewables like onshore wind and PV, which it says no longer need subsidies in any case.

Subsidies continue

Some projects may still be successful, but the case for full-on subsidy cutbacks for renewables is debatable. Especially since nuclear is set to get lavish Contract for Difference (CfD) subsidies for Hinkley, and the plan seems to be to continue with that for future nuclear projects via a new regulated asset base (RAB) model for private finance. The idea is to allow power companies to charge consumers for capital projects before they are built — in effect consumers take the investment risk. The government intends to publish its assessment of a nuclear RAB “in the summer” after consultation as part of the Infrastructure Finance Review announced in parallel with the Spring Statement. With investors getting increasingly risk averse and the costs of nuclear projects rising, RAB may be the only hope for new nuclear. Even then its outlook’s not certain, as Hitachi and Toshiba’s recent decisions to pull out of UK nuclear projects indicated.

The situation looks very different for renewables, as costs continue to fall, as does electricity use. The cost of new balancing technology to deal with the variability of some renewables is also falling. That’s true not just for batteries for short-term storage, but also for Power to Gas hydrogen production for longer-term storage using excess renewable power intermittently or even continuous production from dedicated renewable projects. P2G does seem to be moving forward, with new studies suggesting it is already competitive in niche markets and could be so across the board in around ten years. That would be pretty good going for a technology that only emerged from the lab relatively recently, if you date it from the first ITM Power prototypes. A bit gloomily, a study by the UK’s Imperial College London says that it can take decades to move from the early R&D phase to full scale adoption. P2G seems to be doing better than that; it’s moving up its learning curve fast, aided by commercial-scale deployment.

Just transition

Overall, despite the imbalances and the cutbacks, it looks like the future is bright for the new green energy technologies, with rapid change likely. By 2035, the UK might get 50% or even 60% of its electricity from renewables, and much more later. Rapid technological deployment can of course have problems, for example in terms of the jobs lost as the energy system changes and old technologies are replaced. But there will be new jobs, although also sometimes a need for retraining and transitional support. We need a Just Transition.

As I noted in my last post, as part of that, there will also be wider transitional issues, given that there may be some interim extra costs. It will need careful handling to avoid inequitable social impacts — any short-term costs must be fairly shared. However, the longer-term economic benefits should be increasingly positive as expensive fossil fuel use is avoided and the social and environmental costs of using fossil fuels fall. It already seems to be the case that efficiency upgrades have helped the economy, and as new smart energy supply and management systems spread, the economic benefits should expand.

All this assumes it is done well. And also takes on board heat and transport issues — a big weakness so far. They can be quite tricky to deal with, as Northern Ireland found with its version of the Renewable Heat Incentive and France’s President Macron discovered with his proposed vehicle fuel tax rise. Subsidy handouts and taxes can both be problematic, with the rise of populist backlashes from those who feel they have been left out or left behind adding a new dimension and feeding back, around the world, into political reaction against ostensibly progressive change.

In the UK context, it is good that much of the growth in renewables is in the north — in Scotland and the North East, with Humberside doing well from offshore wind. Along with policy, geography does play a key role. What we must now wait to see is if offshore wind can successfully go further out to sea. The Dogger Bank zone is under development; its furthest reaches are 100 miles or more out. We must also wait to see if the government will relent on land-based wind or whether it, and PV solar, will be able to move ahead fast unaided. And also what happens to green heat. Scotland has set a target of getting 50% of all its energy, including heat, from renewables by 2030 but so far, apart from some indicative electricity projections, there are no UK-wide post 2020 renewable energy targets.

Moving ahead

Plenty to get on with, as a recent UK energy plan produced by Greenpeace suggests. This calls for 45 GW of offshore wind, 40 GW of PV solar and 30 GW of onshore wind by 2030, along with major smart grid balancing systems. The wide-ranging new climate plan produced by the government’s advisory Committee on Climate Change (which I looked at in an earlier post) also has renewables ramping up fast, so as to get the UK to net zero emissions by 2050 with, for example, maybe 75 GW of offshore wind by then.

In my next post I look at a recent study of what might be needed for the rapid acceleration of renewables. That was one of the elements in the Climate Emergency motion passed by the House of Commons on May 1st in the wake of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests. XR called for “zero carbon by 2025”. A way to go on that but the political mood does seem to have changed, with a commitment being made to getting to zero net carbon by 2050. However, the government’s plan to jack up value-added tax (VAT) on materials used for energy systems like PV solar from 5% to 20% seems to belie that, at least in the short term. The abolition of the feed-in tariff (FiT) system likewise, though the new Smart Export Guarantee for small projects, now set to run from January 2020, may compensate a bit and give PV a small boost. The Labour party, meanwhile, says it will fit solar panels on a million social homes and those of low-income households to tackle fuel poverty, and will enable installation on 750,000 more homes through a programme of interest-free loans, grants and changes to regulations. It’s part of Labour’s aim to generate 60% of energy from renewables and low-carbon sources by 2030. Some big changes ahead, maybe, with Labour also planning to nationalize the grid system…

A versatile technology

Plasma, or hot ionized gas, makes up most of the matter in the universe. Consisting of free electrons and positively-charged ions, plasmas have unique properties, such as the ability to generate reactive species, excited atoms and molecules, ultraviolet radiation and electromagnetic fields. Although plasmas are normally very hot, scientists have been able to bring them down to room temperatures and produce these gases at atmospheric pressure, while keeping their properties and allowing them to be used on Earth.

For biophysicist Julia Zimmermann, these high-energy particles sparked a desire to develop various applications for cold atmospheric plasmas. This led her to co-found a family of companies focused on wound treatment, emissions control and more.

Why did you decide to start your first company?

It came out of the scientific work I was doing with my co-founder, Gregor Morfill, at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching. I started working on plasma medicine there after doing my degree in physics and my PhD in biophysics, and we worked very hard on evaluating and developing cold atmospheric plasma devices for different applications. It was a very good time because we were able to build up a big group with a lot of scientists, engineers and medical doctors, with funding from the Max Planck Society (MPS).

But the MPS wanted us to do a technology transfer, and there were also companies that wanted to pay us to work for them because we had some patents that they were interested in. So we founded our company, Terraplasma, with the MPS as a shareholder. It wasn’t really an active decision from us scientists. It was just the next step.

What skills did you and your co-founder bring to Terraplasma?

My co-founder is also my dad, so this works quite well! He’s a plasma physicist, and he brings knowledge about cold plasmas, plasma technology and the associated physical theories. I bring knowledge of biophysics and medicine. In addition to my biophysics PhD, I also did my Habilitation in medicine at the Technical University of Munich in the area of cold plasma-based treatments for medical conditions, mainly focusing on wound treatment. So we were able to put together the plasma technology and the theory behind it in different application areas, such as medical technology, hygiene, drinking water treatment, odour management – things that also need biology.

Neither of us had much knowledge about business, so there was a lot of trial and error. You can learn a lot from colleagues, though. After we founded the company, we went into a so-called “founding centre” where you can exchange knowledge with other start-up companies and learn from them and their managing directors.

How has the company changed over the years?

We started with two people and just one room. Although we’re still small, with 12 employees, we now have three indoor labs and an external technical lab. We made some important investments to build up all these labs, so that we can develop prototypes. We also founded two subsidiary companies, Terraplasma Medical and Terraplasma Emission Control, in 2016 and 2018 respectively, after founding the “mother company” in 2011. This was an active decision from our side: we wanted to get investors in, rather than just working in partnership with big companies, as we’re doing at Terraplasma. At Terraplasma Medical, we now have a small mobile device for chronic wound treatments called the plasma care^® that is currently undergoing CE certification.

What have been your biggest challenges?

We founded Terraplasma Medical with a company called Dynamify. It has people with knowledge in developing medical devices, we had knowledge in developing cold plasma, so it seemed like it would fit perfectly to build a cold plasma medical device together. The problem was that we didn’t have any money to develop it. We needed €4m, and it’s a big challenge to look for investors if your founders are companies, not individual people. Investors don’t like that. Getting qualified people and keeping them in a small company is also a big challenge.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known before you got started with the company?

To be patient. I’m a very impatient person and I’m learning patience. If I had known how long some things take, it would have made life easier. In science, you need patience with your work, but I think it requires a different kind of patience if you’re waiting for other companies to react or answer. You just can’t do anything to speed up the process. Doing science or development is more fun than waiting for contracts or discussing contracts.

Do you have any advice for somebody who’s just starting their own business?

If you found a company, it’s really important that the basic contracts you’re building it on – your shareholder agreement, statute and investment contract, for example – are set up correctly. That way, you still have a “say” in your business, and it’s clear what will happen if you get investors in who will want to sell the company at some point. But one has to be careful what one signs. If you come from a university, you may not know anything about contracts, except your own employment contract, and for me it was totally new. So my advice is to buy a book and read about contract law because there’s a lot of stuff in that area that one doesn’t understand in the beginning.

if you’re a woman founding a company, just ignore stupid comments from stupid people
Julia Zimmermann

Because we have now founded two daughter companies as well, we know a lot, but it was really “learning by doing”. For the first company, we had some funds to pay our legal costs, but investors have more money and they can hire a lot of lawyers, who of course work to get the best deal for their clients. We were lucky in that we had enough money to get a lawyer who was very good and who was able to explain to me exactly what was in every paragraph of the contract. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have understood it as it’s just not my language. Also, if you’re a woman founding a company, just ignore stupid comments from stupid people. The start-up world is a very male-driven environment and people do say strange things sometimes.

T2K searches for single gamma rays from neutrino interactions

Teppei Katori and Pierre Lasorak at Queen Mary University of London have studied data from the the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan to search for signs of single gamma-ray emission from neutrino interactions. Katori explains why scientists around the world are looking for this elusive signal, and describes the latest results from T2K. The research is reported in full in Journal of Physics G, published by IOP Publishing – which also publishes Physics World.

Why did you carry out the research?

We are looking for the emission of a single gamma ray from neutrino interactions. Neutrinos interact with atoms only through the weak nuclear force, which means that in general neutrinos don’t emit light. However, photon emission from neutrinos is predicted as an extremely rare process, either via nuclear physics or as a result of new particles beyond the Standard Model. It would be extremely exciting to find this process in our experiment, which is the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan.

One of the most interesting aspects of current and future experiments like T2K is to measure the “oscillations” between muon-neutrinos and electron-neutrinos. Scientists are looking for electromagnetic signals from the muon-neutrino beam, because electron-neutrinos oscillated from muon-neutrinos create electrons via charged-current weak interaction. If neutrinos emit photons, this mimics neutrino oscillation signals because photons often mimic electrons. In fact, the neutrino photon-emission process was proposed as an explanation of the recent MiniBooNE signal.

Why is this research important?

This is the first attempt to look for mysterious single gamma-emission in the energy region relevant to the MiniBooNE, T2K, and future Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE experiments. All of these experiments are looking for electron-neutrinos produced from muon-neutrino beams to study neutrino mass properties that are beyond the Standard Model. And neutrino single-gamma emission might be an important background to enable us to measure neutrino mass properties correctly.

Theorists are also predicting new processes, involving new neutral particles, which would produce a single gamma ray. For example, several models predict that neutrinos oscillate to “heavy” neutrinos, which then decay to photons or photon-like particles. It is relatively new field to look for new particles in neutrino beams and neutrino detectors, and our data can offer one of the first constraints for some of these models.

What did you do in this study?

T2K is studying neutrino oscillations from a muon-neutrino beam generated at the J-PARC nuclear physics site. The beam is monitored by a “near detector” at J-PARC, called ND280, before being measured by the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector 295 km away. The ND280 is equipped with a high-precision tracking device for measuring particle trajectories – a time-projection-chamber (TPC) detector in a magnetic field – which makes it ideal for making the first observation of neutrino single-gamma emission.

The TPC is particularly useful because neutrino interactions that create a gamma ray also produce an electron–positron pair. Since they have opposite charge, the trajectories will bend in opposite directions in a magnetic field. So we studied the data to see if we could identify two electron-like tracks bending in opposite directions from a neutrino interaction, which would show that the neutrino interaction had made a single gamma ray.

What did you find out?

Unfortunately, on this first attempt, we couldn’t find any evidence of neutrino single-gamma emission in the data. Although we observed many gamma rays from neutrino interactions, our simulation suggests they mostly came from neutral pi mesons (π⁰) – which are commonly produced by neutrino interactions and produce two gamma rays when they decay.

Since the neutrino beam from J-PARC is spread all over the place, lots of gamma rays are produced all around the ND280 detector and some find their way into the TPC. We were unable to estimate this background with high precision, so the data might contain neutrino single-gamma emission but we cannot isolate the signal from the background.

What do you plan to do next?

The T2K experiment is now being updated, and a series of new detectors are being designed and tested in different parts of the world. For example, the WAGASCI and BabyMIND detectors have recently been installed, providing larger volumes that can prevent gamma rays from entering the detector from outside, and we may use these data to look for the single-gamma emission process.

Meanwhile, both the MINERvA and MicroBooNE experiments at Fermilab have been optimized to measure neutrino interactions and they could make the first observation of neutrino single-gamma emission before us. The field is very competitive!

The full results of the study are reported in Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics. The analysis uses the data from the T2K experiment, which involves 317 collaborators who together have contributed to the design, construction and operation of the experiment, as well as data simulation and analysis.

Ball-screw slideway speeds up precision linear positioning in ultrahigh vacuum

UHV Design, which specializes in the design, manufacture and supply of a wide range of HV and UHV motion products, have been providing linear-shift mechanisms (LSMs) since the late 1990s. These LSMs provide linear movement into and out of a vacuum chamber, and exploit a popular bellows configuration that’s still going strong today in both original and upgraded formats.

“The original version has a support shaft, a lead screw and a nut that effectively moves the bellows travelling flange along the port axis,” says Jonty Eyres, engineering director at UHV Design. This allows operators to remotely position objects – such as a sensor or a sample placed at the end of a rod contained inside the bellows – within a sealed vacuum environment just by driving a screw thread.

It’s a reliable solution available in different flange sizes, with a range of stroke lengths and load carrying capabilities. “You can have vacuum loads from a few Newtons all the way up to 2500 N,” Eyres points out. Additional design elements include mounting studs that can compensate for misalignments in the vacuum system, such as when a port is not exactly perpendicular to the chamber.

For alignment, linear speed is typically less important, but if you want to scan then it’s a priority
Jonty Eyres

However, as with any device, there are limits on performance. “Our standard range of LSMs are rated for 10,000 cycles,” explains Eyres, noting that units are often used to make adjustments from time to time, rather than for daily operation.

But what happens if you need to support many measurements and translate objects into and out of a vacuum chamber at higher speed? The LSM’s lead screw and nut mechanism is limited to a linear motion of a few millimeters per second, and requires regular lubrication to keep parts running smoothly.

Ball-screw upgrade

Keen to push performance to a new level, UHV Design released a higher specification version of the popular linear-shift mechanism in 2012, dubbed PLSM. Central to the upgrade is a precision ground stainless steel slideway that guides “carriages” up and down via a system of recirculating ball bearings. This mechanical arrangement includes a so-called ball screw – a spiral configuration in which bearings follow a groove machined into the central drive rail or shaft, and function as a low-friction nut.

Rotating the shaft clockwise or anticlockwise translates the carriages (arranged as a slave and master) linearly up or down the slideway and produces a matching movement of the vacuum sealed bellows attached to the housing.

A key advantage of the super smooth setup is higher speed operation, with the ball screw slideway supporting translation speeds of up to 100 mm/s compared with 5 mm/s for units based on a conventional threaded nut. “For alignment, linear speed is typically less important,” says Eyres. “But if you want to scan then it’s a priority”.

Enabling beam diagnostics

In a synchrotron setting, UHV Design’s customers wanted units that could support wire scanning, which is a popular technique for generating beam density profiles. The measurement involves moving a thin wire (made of tungsten and gold) transversely through the beam and obtaining interaction data at incremental steps.

Other requests included being able to conduct single-point measurements and then rapidly retract the sensor, and for setups designed to chop the beam into sections.

Higher speed operation wasn’t the only factor that the team had to design for. When the synchrotron is active, actuators need to be able to withstand high levels of radiation and must run reliably for long periods of time between scheduled maintenance. “During this period, devices can be expected to perform 50,000 remote actuations without interruption,” Eyres points out.

Thanks to its low-wear integrated linear slide, the PLSM offers much longer duty cycles than the original LSM, keeping maintenance to a minimum. “It can achieve hundreds of thousands of cycles completely free of maintenance,” says Eyres.

The PLSM can also carry higher loads than the LSM if required. As an example, units have been scaled to as large as 2m, while still delivering smooth operation. And as with the original LSM, the product is based on a stable platform so that its actuation always follows a linear path and can be relied upon to deliver consistent results.

Bakeable solution

To meet bakeout requirements of 250 ºC, users are able to wrap heating tape around all of the sections exposed to the vacuum chamber. “The heater tapes are readily available commercially,” adds Eyres, who also notes that this solution was demonstrated by the first customers of the device.

Baking the vacuum components locally means that all of the mechanical mechanisms can be left in place to preserve alignment, rather than having to strip down the device. It also gives the design team more freedom in specifying encoders, which can be used to track actuator position, but would ordinarily have to be removed for bakeout.

To help customers to navigate the range of options and to determine which product will work best for them, UHV Design’s engineers work in partnership with their clients. “One of our strengths as a business is our technical support,” says Graeme Farley, a mechanical designer based at the company’s headquarters in the UK.

The firm has what it claims to be the world’s largest linear-shift mechanism design library at its disposal. Also, to simplify setup, any required sensors, motors and encoders can be incorporated and pre-wired for plug-and-play operation.

For more details on linear shift mechanisms designed for use in high- and ultra-high vacuum, visit the UHV Design website.