Category: Cold ‘n’ cool
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The iron arsenide superconductivity challenge
Until a few weeks ago, all so-called high temperature superconductors were layered copper oxides of the type discovered by Karl Muller and Georg Bednorz back in 1986. These are so-called because they become superconducting at temperatures above 30K, the theoretical limit predicted by the BCS theory (after Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer) of superconductivity that ruled…
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Nanoclusters break superconductivity record
Wow! Every now and again a paper on the arxiv leaps out at you and today there’s work from Indiana University in Bloomington that has got my eyeballs on stalks. Get this: a team led by Martin Jarrold is claiming to have found evidence of superconductivity in aluminium nanoclusters at 200 K . Yep, 200…
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First observation of Hawking radiation?
In 1974, Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes would emit radiation. So-called Hawking radiation is produced when pairs of virtual particles pop into existence near the event horizon of a black hole (as they do all over the universe). Usually these pairs simply annihilate each other and disappear. But Hawking predicted that in some cases,…
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Holographic quantum computing
After a decade or so in the lab, holographic data storage is about to burst into the hardware market big time. Its USP is that holographic data is stored globally rather than at specific sites in the storage medium. It is written using a pair of lasers to create an interference pattern that is recorded…
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The shower temperature problem
Here’s an interesting problem. Imagine a large hotel in which many people are taking a shower at the same time. There isn’t enough hot water to give everyone the shower temperature they’d like and a change in temperature in one shower effects everyone else’s. What strategy should individuals use to achieve the same temperature for…
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Tune into the snowflake channel
Snowflakes can emit radio signals as they form and a better understanding of this process could provide a new way to monitor and study snow formation in the atmosphere. That’s the ice-cool conclusion of a group o’ physicists from France and Israel who have begun to tease apart some of the more subtle processes at…
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Magnetic cloaking
The world has gone crazy over metamaterials cos they can be used to build invisibility cloaks, as ya’ll saw just the other week. There’s usually some drawback the media coverage never tells ya which means that we ain’t gonna see no Harry Potter-type invisibility cloaks any time soon. But that hasn’t stopped the living God…
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First laser built from an artificial atom
Strike a light, artificial atoms are excitin critters to be playin around with right now. Get this: some nanobods at the NEC Nano Electronics Research Laboratories in Tskuba, Japan, have gone and built a laser out of one. Yep, a single artificial atom that produces laser light. Here’s what’s goin on. In real atoms, electrons…
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The ball at the end of the solar system
I know ya’ll think of Pluto as a barren, godforsaken excuse of a planet that ought to be reclassified as a lump of sawdust n’ spit. But that could change when the New Horizons spacecraft arrives at the solar system’s most distant minor second class could-do-better planet (or whatever Pluto is these days) sometime in…
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Quantum metamaterials: the next generation of superweird stuff
Ya’ll heard about metamaterials–that stuff they made invisibility cloaks outta at Duke University last year. It’s mighty strange stuff and it’s about to get a lot weirder in a quantum kinda way. Metamaterials get their properties from their structure rather than their composition. So chuck a few capacitors, inductors and wires into an eggbox and…