Flashback’10: Research/Physics

‘Physics, research’; a look at the topic and you are bound to say poor lad; not enough scope for ‘creativity’ here. And well, you’re correct. O.K. enough of my sick joke. As hard as, I might try to seem a victim, I’m not. Physics, has been a personal favourite, Einstein an idol. I thought of this as an opportunity to brush up a few facts, but well, most of the stuff I found, was way above my intellect, let alone my poor reader (Don’t worry I won’t unleash it all on you! *) It took me around 2-3 days to reach the correct spot. But, well, better Late than Never….

So, here’s how, I’m gonna do it: we would have a subject title and a brief description (allow me to have a bit slackening in this; coz, see, the stuff I like, would essentially find more space).

So, here it goes**….

Anti-hydrogen success + LHC collisions

Let me give you a brief history here: LHC(Large Hadron Collider) comes under CERN, which is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. If you do watch news, it’s the same LHC which was supposed to create black holes, in which the earth, the solar system and what not was supposed to engulfed in.   .But, well, none  of that happened, I’m still here..

• • In March, LHC physicists achieved the first 7 TeV proton-proton collisions ever achieved in a particle accelerator.
  • One of the sub-teams, the ALPHA team announced in November that it had trapped 38 anti-hydrogen atoms for about 170 ms (long enough to study their properties). Now, it has trapped even more atoms to make accurate measurements.
  • The ASACUSA team (another sub), in December, announced it’s ability to create a focused beam of anti-hydrogen that the researchers believe is suitable for making spectroscopic measurements at microwave energies.

If any casual reader did read all of this, then he may ask, what will all of this help me know or how will it help the humanity?

The presence or absence of anti-matter remains one of the biggest mysteries of science. Matter and anti-matter are identical, except for charge. At the time of the Big Bang, both are supposed to have been formed in equal amounts; but as we can see now, our world is built of matter. To know, why nature dumped anti-matter needs detailed research, and that’s why we have this amount of data and pending research.

• Mechanical Device in Quantum realm

Back in March, Physicists Andrew Cleland and Jon Martinis from the University of California at Santa Barbara and their colleagues designed a thin disk, 40 µm in length and consisting of around a trillion atoms; operating at a frequency of 7 billion vibrations per second. This is the first time this feat has been achieved and it could shed light on the mysterious boundaries between the classical and quantum worlds.

• Visible-light cloaking of large objects (large is mm sized objects)

Two teams: 1. George Barbastathis, MIT and the University of Singapore report the cloaking of 2D mm-sized objects; 2. Shuang Zhang and team at the University of Birmingham, Imperial College and the Technical University of Denmark have managed to cloak mm-sized 3D objects. Both the cloaks use natural calcite crystals.

• Proton is smaller than we thought!

These guys wouldn’t even leave something as holy as the proton.An international team led by Randolf Pohl at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics discovered that the proton is about 4% smaller than previously thought. And well 4% is a huge margin as far as the atomic world is considered….

• Martin Weitz and colleagues at the University of Bonn have created a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) from photons

I don’t know how, but this will someday increase efficiency of solar cells. Good News!!

• The first Sound lasers too have been this year’s product only….

Again two teams: one led by Tony Kent at the University of Nottingham in the UK and the other by Ivan Grudinin at Caltech. One of the devices emits sound at about 400 GHz while the other operates in the megahertz range. As sound penetrates most materials, the lasers could be used to obtain 3D images of tiny nanostructures.

• Dynamic holograms

Any Star Wars fans here, or in that matter, any sci-fi fans too will do. Nasser Peyghambarian at the University of Arizona and Nitto Denko Technical Corporation have taken a big step towards making such real-time, dynamic holograms a reality by inventing a photorefractive polymer screen that reacts very quickly to laser light.

This is where I would like to leave you, with a promise that the next year might be even better.

*tried to keep it as simple as possible…!

**I might have missed some, no worries you could bring’em to notice downstairs!!

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