Science - Physics latest news

(PhysOrg.com) -- scientists at the U.S. Department of energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with colleagues at cornell university, Tokyo university, the university of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado, have uncovered the first experimental evidence for why the transition temperature of high-temperature superconductors -- the temperature at which these materials carry electrical current with no resistance -- cannot simply be elevated by increasing the electrons' binding energy. The research -- to be published in the August 28, 2008, issue of Nature -- demonstrates how, as electron-pair binding energy increases, the electrons' tendency to get caught in a quantum mechanical "traffic jam" overwhelms the interactions needed for the material to act as a superconductor -- a freely flowing fluid of electron pairs.

Coherent's LabMax laser power and energy meter is now available with the option of a GPIB interface

Expanded Line of Far IR & THz Band Pass Filters with Center Wavelengths from 10 µm to 200 µm

Practically speaking, single photon detection has not been something pursued very heavily at the wavelengths used for telecommunication signals. Part of the problem is that performance of single photon detectors are rather constrained at such long wavelengths. But, says Robert Thew, a scientist at the university of Geneva, the time is coming when single photon detectors may be needed in telecommunications.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of scientists from the Technische Universität Dresden (Germany) and the ESRF in Grenoble (France) has produced the image of an object at the highest resolution ever achieved with X-ray light. A 100-nanometre gold particle fixed on a substrate was reconstructed with 5 nanometre resolution. Contrary to other techniques, X-ray imaging works also in real-life environments like chemical processing or in the presence of high magnetic fields. The team reports its findings in the newest issue of Phys. Rev. Lett. dated 5 September 2008 (published online 29 August 2008).