the physics arXiv blog

Category: Mountain climbin’

  • Matter wave lithography could carve single nanometre features

    Atomic matter waves have been generating a bit of interest of late. The thinking is that atom waves can be manipulated in much the same way as light waves and so could be used to directly print atoms onto microchips to create nanoscale features. The question is: how small can these features be made and…

  • The fine line between the visible and invisible

    The man who built the world’s first invisibility cloak is back and this time he’s got an even better idea. His first design was a triumph for headline writers and Harry Potter fans alike, although most glossed over the fact that this first cloak worked only for microwave-sensitive eyes and even then only at a…

  • Predicting mine collapse

    Northern France is riddled with limestone mines that occasionally collapse creating a ring-shaped crater on the surface that can cause serious damage to nearby buildings. Is there any way to predict these failures and thereby attempt to prevent them? If there is, Siavash Ghabezloo and Ahmad Pouya from the Laboratoire Centrale des Ponts et Chaussées…

  • Do nuclear decay rates depend on our distance from the sun?

    Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of…

  • The ultimate black hole size limit

    We have a pretty good idea that a supermassive black hole is sitting at the center of our galaxy. By supermassive, astronomers mean about 6 millions times as massive as our sun. That’s pretty big by any standards but how big can black holes get Is there any limit to how big these monsters can…

  • Graphene quantum computers could be built with today’s technology

    Is there anything graphene cannot do? The great graphene gold rush continues today with the news that graphene nanoribbon could be the key ingredient of the next generation of quantum computers. The trick with quantum computing is to use qubit-carrying particles that are easy to manipulate so that their quibits can be written and read,…

  • How to bury an ion (and find it again later)

    The future of computing depends on our ability to bury single ions within the crystal structure of silicon and diamond in a way that allows us to find them again, quickly and repeatably. The burying part of all this isn’t difficult: simply aim a beam of ions at a substrate and you can be pretty…

  • Western Europe warming much faster than expected

    There’s little doubt these days over whether the planet is heating up. Temperature measurements clearly show the trend and in recent years, computer models of the Earth’s climate have been able to reproduce these increases pretty accurately when carbon dioxide is injected into their virtual atmospheres. Where climate models fall down, however, is in predicting…

  • They came from Mercury…

    Astrobods have found several dozen meteorites from Mars and the Moon that have made their way to Earth over the years. These rocks were launched during major impacts there. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a meteorite from Venus arrive on Earth: the Venusian atmosphere is just too thick. But what of Mercury? According to…

  • Extreme ice and the blues

    There are 15 different types of ice known to science and I’m not talkin’ Baskin Robbins here. These are materials with different structures that form when water freezes at various temperatures and pressures. Types XIII and XIV were only discovered in 2006 Most ice we come across naturally is type I, which forms at ambient…