What happened in physics lately? This a recap of all the main stories of 2005 from the world of Physics. It is by no means comprehsive nor is it completely objective. It's just stuff that I've found interesting. I got many links from the American Institute of Physics.

At the Relativistic Heavy Iron Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, the four large detector groups agreed, for the first time, on a consensus interpretation of several year's worth of high enery ion collisions: the fireball made in these collisions --- a sort of stand in for the primoridial universe only a few microseconds after the big bang --- was not a gas of weakly interacting quarks and gluons as earlier expected, but something more like a liquid of strongly interacting quarks and gluons. Click Here

Top physics stories for 2005 include, in general chronological order of their appearance throughout the year, the following:

• The arrival of the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn and the successful landing of the Huygens probe on the moon Titan. Click Here

• The development of lasing in silicon (Nature, 17 February, 2005)

• The biggest burst of light ever recorded from outside the solar system, from a soft gamma repeater. Click Here

• Further evidence for superfluid behavior in a solid. Click Here

• Detection of infrared radiation directly from an exoplanet. Click Here

• Zeptogram mass sensitivity in a cantilever sensor. Click Here

• Spashless impact of droplets at low pressures. Click Here

• The demonstration of pyrofusion, fusion reactions created with a pyroelectric crystal. Click Here

• The best yet prediction of hadron masses using lattice QCD. Click Here

• The best measurement yet of the weak nuclear force. Click Here

• Superfluidity directly observed in a sample of ultracold fermi atoms. Click Here

• Extension of the "comb" technique for measuring frequency (a topic pertaining to the 2005 Nobel prize in physics) into the ultraviolet. Click Here

• Geoneutrinos observed. Click Here

• Hybrid atom-molecule dark states. Click Here

• Using statistical mechanics to predict the effectiveness of flu vaccines. Click Here

• Hydrophobic water. Click Here

• 2005 Nobel Prize. Click Here

• Molecules that walk. Click Here

• Phonon Hall effect. Click Here

• Short gamma ray bursts identified as coming from in-spiraling neutron stars (Nature, 6 October, 2005)

• Hyperentangled states. Click Here

• Further progress in research concerning left-handed or negative-refraction materials, including perfect lensing (Science, 22 April, 2005), almost perfect lensing in the mid-infrared. Click Here
  

• Extension of negative-index behavior into the near-infrared region. Click Here

This entry was posted by Blogpur, on Wednesday, April 05, 2006. You can leave your response.