Tag Archives: physics

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Femtotech: the next big small thing

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Still battering on about nanotech? Man, you’re soooo noughties, get with the program. The new small-scale frontier is femtotech – we’re talking customised atomic nuclei strings here. Says Professor Alexander Bolonkin:

The form of matter containing and subsuming all the atom’s particles [from nucleons (neutrons, protons), electrons and other nuclear particles] into the nucleus is named degenerate matter. Degenerate matter found in white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. Conventionally this matter in such large astronomical objects has a high temperature (as independent particles!) and a high gravity adding a forcing, confining pressure in a very massive celestial objects. In nature, degenerate matter exists stably (as a big lump) to our knowledge only in large astronomical masses (include their surface where gravitation pressure is zero) and into big nuclei of conventional matter. Our purpose is to design artificial small masses of synthetic degenerate matter in form of an extremely thin strong thread (fiber, filament, string), round bar (rod), tube, net (dense or non dense weave and mesh size) which can exist at Earth-normal temperatures and pressures. Note that such stabilized degenerate matter in small amounts does not exist in Nature as far as we know.

All strictly theoretical at the moment, it seems. But hey – if you were worried that putting nanotech into a science fiction story sounds a bit passée nowadays, at least now you can make the jump to the next level without worrying that you’re just making it up out of whole cloth.

Beyond Molecular Nanotechnology is Femtotech : Proposal for Synthesizing Degenerate Matter

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A material world

layersA rather touching story of one man’s creation of a vast materials library of weird and wonderful substances, Mark Miodownik talks about the Kings College Materials Library:

There are turbine jet-engine blades grown from a single crystal and designed to function in the most inhospitable places on the planet. There’s a swatch of the world’s blackest black, 25 times blacker than conventional black paint. There’s a lead bell that refuses to ring, a piece of bone with a saw through it, and the largest blob of Silly Putty you’re ever likely to see.

The philosophy behind the project is charming as well, an attempt to bridge the gap between the two cultures of science and art:

“It’s a way into science for arts people,” Miodownik says. “And for the scientists it’s a lesson in aesthetics and the sensual nature of what they’re doing. It’s a place for people to go to who have an idea floating around the back of their head that hasn’t bubbled to the surface yet.”

[image from doug88888 on flickr][from the FT]

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“Superlenses” could lead to movies of molecules

neonFor a long time physicists thought it was impossible to see anything smaller than about half the wavelength of light.

That’s true if you look at the propagating component of light waves. But light also records smaller sub-wavelength details in its evanescent components, which do not propagate. At least not usually. What [John] Pendry showed [about 10 years ago] was that evanescent components can propagate in a material with a negative refractive index, and he pointed out that a thin film of silver ought to have just the right properties.

Since then, the race has been on to build superlenses. In 2005, Nicolas Fang at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created one that could record details as small as one-sixth of a wavelength. That was a significant improvement over the diffraction limit, but why not better?

Fang and company recently achieved resolution of only one-twelfth the wavelength of light. The theoretical limit is now pegged at one-twentieth a wavelength, which should be small enough to watch molecules in motion.

The impact of such “transparency” on the micro level opens up fertile realm for speculation: Surely drug designers, among others, are going to want superlenses of their own.

[Story: Technology Review physics arXiv blog; thanks for the tip, dpodolsky; London neon sculpture photo: clry2]

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Quantum superposition breakthrough

theory_actualA rich seam of technological and science-fictional ideas seem ready to be mined with the development of the first light trap that can simultaneously store different numbers of photons:

“These superposition states are a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics, but this is the first time they have been controllably created with light,” Cleland said. Martinis added, “This experiment can be thought of as a quantum digital-to-analog converter.” As digital-to-analog converters are key components in classical communication devices (for example, producing the sound waveforms in cell phones), this experiment might enable more advanced communication protocols for the transmission of quantum information.

The research is funded by IARPA. Intelligence services are understandably keen to learn more about the potential for quantum computers to break conventionally encrypted communications.

[image and story from Physorg]

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Dan Brown’s antimatter bombs are nothing to worry about

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mushroom cloudI miss a lot of things about working in public libraries, but exposure to Dan Brown novels is not one of them. As such, I had no idea that Hollywood had made a movie from another of his books, Angels & Demons, but apparently they have.

Less surprising is the revelation that Brown has played fast and loose with the facts (and the writing, I fully expect); Wired UK takes a look at Brown’s antimatter-bomb-in-the-Vatican plot and points out that we’ve no need to worry about terrorists stealing the stuff from CERN:

And it’s true – scientists there really have  produced antimatter. But only in submicroscopic quantities. “If you add up all the antimatter we have made in more than 30 years of antimatter physics here at CERN, and if you were very generous, you might get 10 billionths of a gram,” CERN’s Rolf Landua, told New Scientist magazine recently. “Even if that exploded on your fingertip it would be no more dangerous than lighting a match.”

It would be possible to make more, of course, but not cheap:

The cost of antimatter is, by [NASA’s] estimates $62.5 million per microgram (£41 million). However, they suggest that a dedicated antimatter production facility, with a pricetag of $3 – $10 billion, would bring the price down to just $25,000 per microgram (a mere £16 million).

But even if that much were just lying around, the storage facilities don’t exactly lend themselves to a cat-burglar raid:

Positrons can be stored in a Penning Trap, a sort of magnetic bottle. (The Air Force bought a new positron trap in December – but only for a device to examine defects in semiconductors.) However, such traps are leaky and you can’t store your positrons indefinitely. There’s also the issue of what happens when the power fails. The trap stops working and all your positrons come into contact with the container walls, which could mean a big boom. Then there’s the question of how many positrons you can store. At the moment storing a microgram of positrons would require a Penning Trap of stupendous size. A 2004 report by the US National Research Council said that much greater energy densities were needed for positrons to be useful as an explosive. The study advised against heavy investment in such a high-risk, immature technology.

So, fear not – the Vatican is safe from antimatter, at least for now. Given the size of the place, I can’t imagine why you’d think you needed anything bigger than a small nuke to take it out… but that doesn’t sound quite as exotic, I guess, and exotic puts the ‘thrill’ into ‘technothriller’. Best leave the plausibility and scientific rigour to those science fiction nerds, eh? [image by V 2]