Jefferson Lab researchers utilize CLAS and CEBAF’s 5.7 GeV continuous beam to gather new insights on several fundamental questions about the neutron
The CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) is like a perfect survey instrument. Because it surrounds the interaction point in Jefferson Lab’s Hall B, it can record several particles produced in a subatomic interaction at once. More than 40,000 data channels convey information on the trajectory (measured with drift chambers),
There will be greater tension than usual among engineers and scientists at Europe`s spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, in January 2003, as they gather to see ESA`s comet-chasing spacecraft Rosetta departing on its long journey. If it is to keep its rendezvous with Comet Wirtanen in 2012, Rosetta must lift off on its Ariane-5 launcher no sooner than 03:40 CET on 13 January 2003 and no later than the end of that month. This span of suitable dates is called a launch window. For interplanetary
In a new report, a team of senior women physicists have challenged the scientific and academic establishments to tackle the problem of female under-representation in physics careers. The report, “Women Physicists Speak”, was led by Professor Gillian Gehring of the University of Sheffield and will be launched at a meeting of the Institute of Physics on 5 September. It is the result of an international conference about the issue and makes a number of important recommendations. · Women in Leade
Computer and optical communications engineers are now using optical structures to produce faster, more powerful, light-based processors and networks. However, according to Dr Andrew Parker from Oxford University, they are well behind the times as nature has been making these optical structures for at least 515 million years. He and his team are now planning to unravel nature`s manufacturing process and use it to create man-made optical devices.
Speaking at the Photon02 Conference in Cardiff
The Near Earth Asteroid 2002 NY40 was observed with the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands, on the night of August 17 to 18, 2002. The asteroid was imaged just before its closest approach to Earth, using the Adaptive Optics system NAOMI. These are the first images of a Near Earth Asteroid obtained with an Adaptive Optics system. During these observations the asteroid was 750,000 kilometres away, twice the distance to the Moon, and moving very rapidly across the sky (crossing a di
The team of senior women physicists (including the University of Warwick’s Professor Sandra Chapman) who represented the UK at the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics first international conference on Women in Physics, looking at the under-representation of women in physics world-wide, have now produced a detailed report entitled “Women Physicists Speak” on the issue with recommendations including: Action to involve more women physicists in science leadership. Key science bodies s
Solar physicists at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL, University College London) in Surrey have found new clues to the thirty year old puzzle of why the Sun ejects huge bubbles of electrified gas, laced with magnetic field, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). In a paper published this month in the Journal of Solar Physics, they explain that the key to understanding CMEs, which can cause electricity black outs on Earth, may be due to twisted magnetic fields originating deep within the he
The production of fusion energy with a PetaWatt laser is a step closer now that a team of scientists from Japan and the UK has demonstrated that the physics works. Using the GEKKO XII laser system at the Osaka University in Japan, the team has successfully conducted experiments at laser powers equivalent to those required for a full-scale ignition system, and the results will be published in Nature on Thursday 29 August 2002.
“We carried out a first “proof of principle” experiment in 2001 th
Discovery reveals smallest size molecules form functional structures; nanotechnology, research implications may be significant
While it may not make much of an anniversary present, a gold chain built atom by atom by UC Irvine physicist Wilson Ho offers an answer to one of the basic questions of nanotechnology—how small can you go?
In the first study of its kind, Ho and his colleagues have discovered the molecular phase when a cluster of atoms develops into a solid structur
The world’s most sensitive Gamma Ray telescopes are being inaugurated in Namibia (in Southwest Africa) on September 3rd. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), a European/African collaboration in which the UK is a partner, will look for Gamma Rays produced by the most energetic particles in the Universe. The array initially consists of four telescopes, the first of which will become operational next week. This one telescope alone is more sensitive than any other existing ground-based array o
When “frustrated” by their arrangement, magnetic atoms surrender their individuality, stop competing with their neighbors and then practice a group version of spin control—acting collectively to achieve local magnetic order—according to scientists from the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, Johns Hopkins University and Rutgers University writing in the Aug. 22, 2002, issue of the journal Nature.
The unexpected composite behavior detected in experiments
The peculiar behavior of high-temperature superconductors has baffled scientists for many years. Now, by imaging the copper-oxide plane in a cuprate superconductor for the first time, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found several new pieces to this important puzzle.
As reported in the Aug. 19 issue of Physical Review Letters, physics professor Ali Yazdani, graduate student Shashank Misra, and colleagues used a scanning tunneling microscope to demonstrate t
First-principles calculation explains the strange behavior of magnesium diboride
Magnesium diboride (MgB2) becomes superconducting at 39 degrees Kelvin, one of the highest known transition temperatures (Tc) of any superconductor. What’s more, its puzzling characteristics include more than one superconducting energy gap, a state of affairs anticipated in theory but never before seen experimentally.
Now theorists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Universit
A Bose-Einstein condensate, a form of matter heretofore only observed in atoms chilled to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, may now have been observed at temperatures in excess of one degree Kelvin in excitons, the bound pairs of electrons and holes that enable semiconductors to function as electronic devices.
Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with a scientist at the University of California’s Santa Barbara camp
VLT Observes Wolf-Rayet Stars in Virgo Cluster Galaxies [1]
Do very massive stars form in metal-rich regions of the Universe and in the nuclei of galaxies ? Or does “heavy element poisoning” stop stellar growth at an early stage, before young stars reach the “heavyweight class”?
What may at the first glance appear as a question for specialists actually has profound implications for our understanding of the evolution of galaxies, those systems of billions of stars – the m
Looking into the interior of the Earth or the Sun is a bit similar to examining a baby in its mother`s womb using an ultrasound scan. Light cannot penetrate the area, so we make pictures in these cases using sound waves, which human ears cannot hear. With SOHO, ESA has probed deeply into the Sun using the sound-waves principle, and with great success. The future missions, Solar Orbiter and Eddington, will look inside our Sun and other stars, respectively, in a similar way.
Here on Earth, whe
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