It was an exciting year in the endless frontier of new science and the field of physics in 2008, The editors and science writers at the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society have chosen ten topics as some of the best.
Research Discoveries Selected
The topics selected were presented in no special order and included:
Superconductors:
An unusual class of materials made from iron and arsenic. The new iron-arsenic materials are the first relatively high-temperature materials that remain superconducting above a temperature of 50 degrees Kelvin (-370 degrees Fahrenheit) that don't contain copper. The copper materials are brittle. (Physics Today 5/2008)
Large Hadron Collider:
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which started operations in September 2008, is the world's largest scientific instrument. This huge particle accelerator, that is located underground near Geneva, Switzerland, has two beams of protons, each traveling at unprecedent speeds when smashed together.The collision has not yet occurred but there was success in sending proton beams in both directions. (CERN Report 12/5/2008)
Planets
Planets orbiting the distant stars have been imaged directly and a host of interesting results have come back from spacecraft hovering near the planets in the earth's own solar system. Extrasolar plants, planets orbiting far-away stars, have been detected indirectly by watching what happens to the light coming from the star. Now the glare of the star has been blocked sufficiently so that the extrasolar planet itself can be imaged.
Quarks
Unusual combinations of quarks were observed for the first time. One discovery consists of the sighting of nuclear particles containing rare "bottom" quarks. At Fermilab's D0 experiment, a particle (a bottom-quark version of the omega hyperon) containing two "strange quarks and one bottom quark were detected. (Physics Today 11/2008)
Farthest Seeable Thing
The brightest-ever gamma rays buster was observed by the Swift satellite - specially designed to detect gamma rays---and other telescopes as well. They deduced that this burst event came from a place in space 7 billion light years away, and was bright enough to have by observable by the naked eye. (Nature, 9/11/2008)
Diamond Detectors
Manipulating the spin of an electron caught in a vacancy within a diamond sample, scientists from Delft University of Technology and the University of California at Santa Barbara detected the spin of a single electron (Science, 4/18/2008) while a Harvard Group located the position of a single carbon 11 impurity in a diamond to within 1 nanometer through the carbon atom's nuclear spin interaction. (Nature, 10/2/2008) This could result in creating a new type of electronic circuit.
Cosmic Rays
Cosmic rays are super-high-energy particles whizzing through the cosmos. Scientists associated with the balloon-borne ATIC detector (Nature 11/20/2008) and the satellite PAMELA report evidence for an excess of cosmic-ray electrons which may account for the annihilation of heavy dark matter particles.
Light Passes Through Opaque Matter
When light strikes an opaque material like milk most of the radiation is scattered; little of it passes through the sample. In an experiment at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, much more light can be made to traverse the scattering material if beforehand the wavefront of the incoming light is shaped by special filters. (Physics Today, 9/2008)
Macroscopic Feedback Cooling
Scientists at the AURIGA lab in Padova, Italy have cooled a one-ton aluminum bar to a temperature below 1 milli-kelvin using special electrical currents. The bar is part of a detector designed to measure passing gravity waves from space.
Background and further information on these breakthroughs can be found at internet sites for American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society.
Source:
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Cassini Equinox Mission
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