The Physics arXiv Blog
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Particles ‘n’ waves
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Signatures of a Hidden Cosmic Microwave Background White-Light Imaging in a Two Gratings Diffraction Process The “Quantum Mousetrap”: Entangled States and Gravitational Waves Predictions for the LHC: an Overview Ideal and nonideal electromagnetic cloaks The Peculiar Volatile Composition of Comet 8P/Tuttle: A Contact Binary…
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How antineutrino monitoring could prevent nuclear proliferation
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has been ratified by more countries than any other arms limitation or disarmament treaty (187 at the last count). Its goal is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology. The task of monitoring compliance of the treaty is the job of the International Atomic Energy Authority and one…
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The next high temperature superconductor?
Following the discovery that a class of layered iron arsenides become superconducting above 40K, the air has been heavy with the boiling and smelting of new compounds that might also behave in this way. The trick is to find a compound that mimics the structure of the iron arsenides in question. These have a tetragonal…
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Stats prove Red Baron’s WW1 victories were down to luck
Here’s a great anecdote from Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at the University of California, Los Angeles: During the “Manhattan project” (the making of the nuclear bomb), physicist Enrico Fermi asked General Leslie Groves, the head of the project, what was the definition of a “great” general. Groves replied that any general who had won…
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Solving the faint young Sun problem
We know by studying ancient rocks that liquid water existed on the surface of Earth at least 3.7 billion years ago. That implies that the surface temperature at that time was at least 273K. We also know by studying stars similar to ours that the Sun must have been significantly less bright than it is…
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First superheavy element found in nature
The hunt for superheavy elements has focused banging various heavy nuclei together and hoping they’ll stick. In this way, physicists have extended the periodic table by manufacturing elements 111, 112, 114, 116 and 118, albeit for vanishingly small instants. Although none of these elements is particularly long lived, they don’t have progressively shorter lives and…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…this week’s sparklers from the physics arXiv blog: ET more likely to pick up radar bursts than radio transmissions Bluetooth surveillance secretly tested in the city of Bath First observation of antibonding in artificial molecules Modelling how birds mistime egg-laying due to climate change The iron arsenide superconductivity challenge
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Iron ‘n’ stone
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: From Formal Proofs to Mathematical Proofs: a safe, incremental way for building in first-order decision procedures A Single Molecule Transistor Based on Amino-substituted Butanethiol Molecular Junctions A Survey of Quantum Computational Complexity Unusual Magnetic Behavior in Ferrite Hollow Nanospheres Mesoscopic Study on Historic Masonry…
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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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Modelling how birds mistime egg-laying due to climate change
Many birds have to time egg-laying to coincide with a peak in food availability, for example , to match the hatching shcedule of a particular type of caterpillar. This is a tricky business because many caterpillars are available for only a few weeks and the birds must lay their eggs around a month in advance…