Physics Nobel 2023: A Primer

Image Courtsey: NobelPrize.org

Author: Biplab Bhawal

In the early days of photography, pictures were all motionless. Those were either pictures of calm and quiet landscapes or pictures of families, in which -- not just the parents -- even the children were all very sober and sensible boys and girls. They never seemed to be running around.

But people could never live happily thereafter with whatever was achieved by then. They wanted something better.

They observed how the legs of a running baby or a horse were getting ghostly blurry when they tried taking pictures of such objects in motion. Photographing the 100m race at the Olympics posed a similar problem.

So, Now they started worrying about `Shutter Speed' or how quickly the shutter of the camera `opens and closes'. Things were getting blurry because the shutter speed could not catch up with the speed of the object in the photograph.

The minimum 'shutter speed' used these days is rough 'one-sixtieth of a second', depending on what the image is and how far away the focus is.

But, as usual, people could never live happily thereafter with whatever was achieved at any point in time. As usual, They wanted something even better.

They wanted to see every minute movement of the body of an athlete running 100 meters. They wanted to see how exactly hummingbird's wings flap up and down so quickly.

Thus began the era of photography when people wanted to see what they could not even see with their naked eyes.

The greatest achievement of humankind in the year 2020 was the quick development of the COVID-19 vaccine. So, most people could not pay enough attention to keep track of the news that in the same fateful year, a camera was developed at Caltech with a shutter speed of 140 trillionths of a second.

Again, people are not satisfied yet ....

Some thought they would want to get a better look at how electrons move around in atoms to understand how atoms and molecules interact with each other and how various chemical reactions happen.

Electrons, however, move very quickly within atoms. The speed is about 2200 km per second. At this speed, one can travel around the earth in just 18 seconds.

So researchers gradually developed such a unique pulse laser that is capable of generating an equivalent `shutter speed' of only 4000 trillionths of 1 second.

[Remember though we are now looking at what is happening inside atoms. The concept of `shutter speed' is no longer quite appropriate here. The act of `Looking' is no longer the same as `Looking with our eyes'. The size of an atom is about ten-millionth of a hair-width. So, `looking inside an atom' is governed by quantum mechanics. Newtonian Physics and intuition do not really apply here]

This year's Nobel Prize is a recognition of that success.

Physics Nobel Prize 2015: Neutrino Oscillations

Takaaki Kajita (left) and Arthur B. McDonald

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 is awarded jointly to Takaaki Kajita (of Super-Kamiokande Collaboration, University of Tokyo, Japan) and Arthur B. McDonald (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration, Queen’s University, Canada) "for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass".

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 recognises Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald  for their key contributions to the experiments which demonstrated that neutrinos change identities. This metamorphosis requires that neutrinos have mass. The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe.

Around the turn of the millennium, Takaaki Kajita presented the discovery that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan.

Meanwhile, the research group in Canada led by Arthur B. McDonald could demonstrate that the neutrinos from the Sun were not disappearing on their way to Earth. Instead they were captured with a different identity when arriving to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.

A neutrino puzzle that physicists had wrestled with for decades had been resolved. Compared to theoretical calculations of the number of neutrinos, up to two thirds of the neutrinos were missing in measurements performed on Earth. Now, the two experiments discovered that the neutrinos had changed identities.

The discovery led to the far-reaching conclusion that neutrinos, which for a long time were considered massless, must have some mass, however small.

For particle physics this was a historic discovery. Its Standard Model of the innermost workings of matter had been incredibly successful, having resisted all experimental challenges for more than twenty years. However, as itrequires neutrinos to be massless, the new observations had clearly showed that the Standard Model cannot be the complete theory of the fundamental constituents of the universe.

The discovery rewarded with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics have yielded crucial insights into the all but hidden world of neutrinos. After photons, the particles of light, neutrinos are the most numerous in the entire cosmos. The Earth is constantly bombarded by them.

Many neutrinos are created in reactions between cosmic radiation and the Earth’s atmosphere. Others are produced in nuclear reactions inside the Sun. Thousands of billions of neutrinos are streaming through our bodies each second. Hardly anything can stop them passing; neutrinos are nature’s most elusive elementary particles.

Now the experiments continue and intense activity is underway worldwide in order to capture neutrinos and examine their properties. New discoveries about their deepest secrets are expected to change our current understanding of the history, structure and future fate of the universe.

Homepage of Takaaki Kajita >>
Homepage of Arthur B. McDonald >>

Physics Nobel Prize 2014: Blue LED

(From Left to Right) Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2014 to Isamu Akasaki (Meijo University, Nagoya, Japan and Nagoya University, Japan), Hiroshi Amano (Nagoya University, Japan) and Shuji Nakamura (University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA) “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”.

This year’s Nobel Laureates are rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source – the blue light-emitting diode (LED). In the spirit of Alfred Nobel the Prize rewards an invention of greatest benefit to mankind; using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way. With the advent of LED lamps we now have more long-lasting and more efficient alternatives to older light sources.

When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades.

They succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps.

White LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux (measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). The most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 for regular light bulbs and close to 70 for fluorescent lamps. As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth’s resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights.

Blue light has a shorter wavelength than other colors such as red and green, and therefore can be used to read and write smaller and smaller bits of information. Creating blue LEDs and lasers was a technologically difficult feat. While compact disc players were on the scene since 1982, Blu-Ray players and the Playstation 3, introduced in late 2006, were among the first consumer electronics devices to use these shorter-wavelength diode lasers. (Fun fact: Even though they're called Blu-Ray, the lasers in the players and Playstation are actually violet, an even shorter-wavelength color.)

The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.

The invention of the blue LED is just twenty years old, but it has already contributed to create white light in an entirely new manner to the benefit of us all.

Homepage of Isamu Akasaki >>
Homepage of Hiroshi Amano >>
Homepage of Shuji Nakamura >>

Physics Nobel Prize 2013: Higgs Boson

Peter Higgs (left) and François Englert (right)

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider"

In 1964, they proposed the theory independently of each other (Englert together with his now deceased colleague Robert Brout) [1,2]. In 2012, their ideas were confirmed by the discovery of a so called Higgs particle at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva in Switzerland.

François Englert, Belgian citizen. Born 1932 in Etterbeek, Belgium. Ph.D. 1959 from Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. Professor Emeritus at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium.

Link to Prof. Englert's homepage >>

Peter W. Higgs, UK citizen. Born 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Ph.D. 1954 from King’s College, University of London, UK. Professor emeritus at University of Edinburgh, UK.

Link to Prof. Higg's homepage >>

The awarded theory is a central part of the Standard Model of particle physics that describes how the world is constructed. According to the Standard Model, everything, from flowers and people to stars and planets, consists of just a few building blocks: matter particles. These particles are governed by forces mediated by force particles that make sure everything works as it should.

The entire Standard Model also rests on the existence of a special kind of particle: the Higgs particle. This particle originates from an invisible field that fills up all space. Even when the universe seems empty this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass. The theory proposed by Englert and Higgs describes this process.

On 4 July 2012, at the CERN laboratory for particle physics, the theory was confirmed by the discovery of a Higgs particle. CERN’s particle collider, LHC (Large Hadron Collider), is probably the largest and the most complex machine ever constructed by humans. Two research groups of some 3,000 scientists each, ATLAS and CMS, managed to extract the Higgs particle from billions of particle collisions in the LHC [3,4].

Even though it is a great achievement to have found the Higgs particle — the missing piece in the Standard Model puzzle — the Standard Model is not the final piece in the cosmic puzzle. One of the reasons for this is that the Standard Model treats certain particles, neutrinos, as being virtually massless, whereas recent studies show that they actually do have mass. Another reason is that the model only describes visible matter, which only accounts for one fifth of all matter in the cosmos. To find the mysterious dark matter is one of the objectives as scientists continue the chase of unknown particles at CERN.

References:
[1] F. Englert and R. Brout, “Broken symmetry and the mass of gauge vector mesons”. Physical Review Letters, 13, 321 (1964). Abstract. Read full paper in Google Books.
[2] P. W. Higgs, "Broken symmetries, massless particles and gauge fields". Physics Letters, 12, 132-133 (1964). Abstract. 
[3] ATLAS Collaboration, "Observation of a New Particle in the Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC", Physics Letters B, 716, 1-29 (2012). Full Paper.
[4] CMS Collaboration, "Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC", Physics Letters B, 716, 30-61 (2012). Full paper.

Physics Nobel Prize 2012: Quantum Measurement

Serge Haroche (left) and David J. Wineland (right)










The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Serge Haroche (Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France) and David J. Wineland (National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA) "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems".

Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland have independently invented and developed methods for measuring and manipulating individual particles while preserving their quantum-mechanical nature, in ways that were previously thought unattainable.

The Nobel Laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them. For single particles of light or matter the laws of classical physics cease to apply and quantum physics takes over. But single particles are not easily isolated from their surrounding environment and they lose their mysterious quantum properties as soon as they interact with the outside world. Thus many seemingly bizarre phenomena predicted by quantum physics could not be directly observed, and researchers could only carry out thought experiments that might in principle manifest these bizarre phenomena.

Past 2Physics articles on works of Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland:

Jul 10, 2011: "Chilling of Micromechanical Motion to the Quantum Ground State"
Sep 26, 2010: "Aluminum Atomic Clocks Reveal Einstein's Relativity at a Personal Scale"
Feb 21, 2010: "World’s Most Precise Clock : NIST Developed Second ‘Quantum Logic Clock’ Based on Aluminum Ion"
Aug 15, 2009: "NIST Physicists Demonstrate Sustained Quantum Processing in Step Toward Building Quantum Computers "
Mar 28, 2008: "‘Quantum Logic Clock’ Rivals Mercury Ion as World’s Most Accurate Clock : A new limit on change in fine-structure constant"
Mar 15, 2007: "Life & Death of a Single Photon Observed"

Through their ingenious laboratory methods Haroche and Wineland together with their research groups have managed to measure and control very fragile quantum states, which were previously thought inaccessible for direct observation. The new methods allow them to examine, control and count the particles.

Their methods have many things in common. David Wineland traps electrically charged atoms, or ions, controlling and measuring them with light, or photons.

Serge Haroche takes the opposite approach: he controls and measures trapped photons, or particles of light, by sending atoms through a trap.

Homepage of Serge Haroche at Collège de France, Paris >>

Both Laureates work in the field of quantum optics studying the fundamental interaction between light and matter, a field which has seen considerable progress since the mid-1980s. Their ground-breaking methods have enabled this field of research to take the very first steps towards building a new type of super fast computer based on quantum physics. Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century. The research has also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time, with more than hundred-fold greater precision than present-day caesium clocks.

Physics Nobel Prize 2011: Accelerating Expansion of the Universe

[L to R] Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, Adam G. Riess

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 was awarded "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae" with one half to Saul Perlmutter and the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess.

Here are the contact information and links to their homepages and institutes:

Saul Perlmutter, The Supernova Cosmology Project, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Brian P. Schmidt, The High-z Supernova Search Team, Australian National University, Weston Creek, Australia

Adam G. Riess, The High-z Supernova Search Team, Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

Past 2Physics article on the work of Saul Perlmutter:
April 25, 2010: "Searching Dark Energy with Supernova Dataset"

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice..."
(Robert Frost, Fire and Ice, 1920)

What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year's Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves.

In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Saul Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988. Brian Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Adam Riess was to play a crucial role.

The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called type Ia supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected - this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.

The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma - perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

Physics Nobel Prize 2010: Graphene

Andre Geim (photo courtesy: Sergeom, Wikimedia Commons) and Konstantin Novoselov (photo courtesy: University of Manchester, UK)

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 was awarded jointly to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene"

Graphene is a form of carbon. As a material it is completely new – not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. As a conductor of electricity it performs as well as copper. As a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it. Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again.

Homepage of Andre Geim >> Homepage of Konstantin Novoselov >>
Link to the Mesoscopic Physics Group, University of Manchester, UK >>

Geim and Novoselov extracted the graphene from a piece of graphite such as is found in ordinary pencils. Using regular adhesive tape they managed to obtain a flake of carbon with a thickness of just one atom. This at a time when many believed it was impossible for such thin crystalline materials to be stable.

However, with graphene, physicists can now study a new class of two-dimensional materials with unique properties. Graphene makes experiments possible that give new twists to the phenomena in quantum physics. Also a vast variety of practical applications now appear possible including the creation of new materials and the manufacture of innovative electronics. Graphene transistors are predicted to be substantially faster than today’s silicon transistors and result in more efficient computers.

Since it is practically transparent and a good conductor, graphene is suitable for producing transparent touch screens, light panels, and maybe even solar cells.

When mixed into plastics, graphene can turn them into conductors of electricity while making them more heat resistant and mechanically robust. This resilience can be utilised in new super strong materials, which are also thin, elastic and lightweight. In the future, satellites, airplanes, and cars could be manufactured out of the new composite materials.

This year’s Laureates have been working together for a long time now. Konstantin Novoselov, 36, first worked with Andre Geim, 51, as a PhD-student in the Netherlands. He subsequently followed Geim to the United Kingdom. Both of them originally studied and began their careers as physicists in Russia. Now they are both professors at the University of Manchester.

Playfulness is one of their hallmarks, one always learns something in the process and, who knows, you may even hit the jackpot. Like now when they, with graphene, write themselves into the annals of science.

Physics Nobel 2009 : The Masters of Light

Charles K. Kao [photo courtesy: Chinese University of Hong Kong]

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies. They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half to Charles K. Kao of Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication", and the other half jointly to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith of Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor".

In 1966, Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. Kao's enthusiasm inspired other researchers to share his vision of the future potential of fiber optics. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970.

Willard S Boyle [photo courtesy: RMC Club of Canada]

Today optical fibers make up the circulatory system that nourishes our communication society. These low-loss glass fibers facilitate global broadband communication such as the Internet. Light flows in thin threads of glass, and it carries almost all of the telephony and data traffic in each and every direction. Text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second.

If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25 000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.

A large share of the traffic is made up of digital images, which constitute the second part of the award. In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 year's Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge when designing an image sensor was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time.

George E. Smith [photo courtesy: IEEE]

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film. The digital form facilitates the processing and distribution of these images. CCD technology is also used in many medical applications, e.g. imaging the inside of the human body, both for diagnostics and for microsurgery.

Digital photography has become an irreplaceable tool in many fields of research. The CCD has provided new possibilities to visualize the previously unseen. It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans.

Physics Nobel 2008: Spontaneous Broken Symmetry

Yoichiro Nambu

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008 with one half to Yoichiro Nambu, Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" and the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan and Toshihide Maskawa, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature"

The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level. As early as 1960, Yoichiro Nambu formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics. Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface. It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu’s theories permeate the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The Model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory.

Makoto Kobayashi

The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied, differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964. It is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks. These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics experiments. As late as 2001, the two particle detectors BaBar at Stanford, USA and Belle at Tsukuba, Japan, both detected broken symmetries independently of each other. The results were exactly as Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted almost three decades earlier.

Toshihide Maskawa

A hitherto unexplained broken symmetry of the same kind lies behind the very origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, they ought to have annihilated each other. But this did not happen, there was a tiny deviation of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles. It is this broken symmetry that seems to have caused our cosmos to survive.

The question of how this exactly happened still remains unanswered. Physicists are now searching for the spontaneous broken symmetry, the Higgs mechanism, which gave the particles their masses and there should be a Higgs particle, theory predicts. Scientists at the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN in Switzerland, will be looking for this particle when they re-start the collider in spring of 2009.

Physics Nobel Prize 2007 for 'Giant Magnetoresistance'

Albert Fert (left) and Peter Grünberg (right) [Photo Courtesy: Unité mixte de physique CNRS/Thales, Orsay and Institut für Festkörperforschung, Forschungszentrum Jülich ]

Laptops, iPods and so many other small-sized devices that have defined a new generation of our civilization owe a large part of their existence to the discovery of a fundamental effect in Physics about 19 years back and this year's Nobel Prize celebrates this path-breaking advancement that influenced so much the growth of the computer industry and days of our lives.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for 2007 jointly to Albert Fert (France) and Peter Grünberg (Germany) for the discovery of 'Giant Magnetoresistance’ or GMR.

Albert Fert is currently professor at Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, since 1976 and scientific director of the Unité mixte de physique CNRS/Thales, Orsay, since 1995. He earned his PhD in 1970 at the Université Paris-Sud. He was born on 7 March 1938 at Carcassonne. Peter Grünberg is a Professor at Institut für Festkörperforschung, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, since 1972. He was born on May 18, 1939. Grünberg received his Ph.D in 1969 at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.

About 'Giant Magnetoresistance’ (GMR): In 1988 the Frenchman Albert Fert and the German Peter Grünberg each independently discovered this totally new physical effect. They observed that very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current.

A hard disk stores information, such as music, in the form of microscopically small areas magnetized in different directions. The information is retrieved by a read-out head that scans the disk and registers the magnetic changes. The smaller and more compact the hard disk, the smaller and weaker the individual magnetic areas. More sensitive read-out heads are therefore required if information has to be packed more densely on a hard disk. A read-out head based on the GMR effect can convert very small magnetic changes into differences in electrical resistance and therefore into changes in the current emitted by the read-out head. The current is the signal from the read-out head and its different strengths represent ones and zeros.

Soon after the discovery of Fert and Grünberg, researchers and engineers began work to enable use of the effect in read-out heads. In 1997 the first read-out head based on the GMR effect was launched and this soon became the standard technology. Thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players, for instance. Even the most recent read-out techniques of today are further developments of GMR.

"The GMR effect was discovered thanks to new techniques developed during the 1970s to produce very thin layers of different materials. If GMR is to work, structures consisting of layers that are only a few atoms thick have to be produced. For this reason GMR can also be considered one of the first real applications of the promising field of nanotechnology", The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Homepage of Albert Fert: http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/338.htm
Homepage of Peter Grünberg: http://www.fz-juelich.de/portal/gruenberg/

Those Historic Papers:
"Giant Magnetoresistance of (001)Fe/(001)Cr Magnetic Superlattices",
M. N. Baibich, J. M. Broto, A. Fert, F. Nguyen Van Dau, F. Petroff, P. Eitenne, G. Creuzet, A. Friederich, J. Chazelas,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 2472, (1988), Abstract.
&
"Enhanced magnetoresistance in layered magnetic structures with antiferromagnetic interlayer exchange",
G. Binasch, P. Grünberg, F. Saurenbach, and W. Zinn,
Phys. Rev. B 39 (7), 4828-4830 (1989). Abstract.

Physics Nobel 2006: Mather & Smoot

George F Smoot

John C Mather and George F Smoot have been jointly awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. John C. Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and George F Smoot is Physics Professor at University of California at Berkeley.

Their work looks back into the infancy of the Universe and attempts to gain some understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars. Their work is based on measurements made with the help of the COBE satellite launched by the NASA on November 18, 1989. The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the Universe. The measurements also marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science. It was not long before it was followed up, for instance by the WMAP satellite, which yielded even clearer images of the background radiation. Soon, the European Planck satellite will be launched in order to study the radiation in even greater detail.

John C Mather

According to the Big Bang scenario, the cosmic microwave background radiation is a relic of the earliest phase of the Universe. Immediately after the big bang itself, the Universe can be compared to a glowing body emitting radiation in which the distribution across different wavelengths depends solely on its temperature. The shape of the spectrum of this kind of radiation has a special form known as blackbody radiation. When it was emitted, the temperature of the Universe was almost 3,000 degrees Centigrade. Since then, according to the Big Bang scenario, radiation has gradually cooled as the Universe has expanded. The background radiation we can measure today corresponds to a temperature that is barely 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

The background radiation was first measured in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson with their radio antenna at Bell Telephone Laboratories. They received Nobel Prize for their work in 1978. Smooth and Mather's work led to more precise measurements of various characteristics of this radiation with COBE satellite.

WMAP has produced a detailed picture of the infant universe. Colors indicate "warmer" (red) and "cooler" (blue) spots. The white bars show the "polarization" direction of the oldest light [Photo credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team]

COBE also had the task of seeking small variations of temperature in different directions (anisotropy). Extremely small differences of this kind in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation -- in the range of a hundred-thousandth of a degree -- offer an important clue to how the galaxies came into being. The variations in temperature show us how the matter in the Universe began to 'aggregate.' This was necessary if the galaxies, stars and ultimately life like us were to be able to develop. Without this mechanism, matter would have taken a completely different form, spread evenly throughout the Universe.

Further Study:
WMAP's introductory page on Cosmic Microwave background
Wikipedia page on Cosmic Microwave Background

Physics Nobel 2005

Roy J. Glauber

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to U.S.
scientists Roy J. Glauber and John L. Hall and to
Theodor W. Haensch of Germany for their work
in the field of optics, it was announced Tuesday
in Stockholm. Glauber, 80, of Harvard University
was awarded half the prize money of 10 million
kronor (EUR 1.1 million) "for his contribution to
the quantum theory of optical coherence," the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Glauber's groundbreaking work, reported back in 1963, is in the theoretical
description of the behaviour of light particles. His contributions were
described as "pioneering work in applying quantum physics to optical
phenomena," the Academy said. It added that Glauber had helped explain
"fundamental differences between hot sources of light such as light bulbs,
with a mixture of frequencies and phases, and lasers which give a specific
frequency and phase". Possible implementations of his work on quantum
phenomena include encryption of messages within communication technology.

John L. Hall

Hall, 71, of Colorado University and Haensch, 63,
of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics
and Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, share
the other half of the prize "for their contributions
to the development of laser-based precision
spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb
technique".

Hall and Haensch's work was on the determination
of the color of the light of atoms and molecules with extreme precision. The
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Hall and Haensch had "made it
possible to measure frequencies with an accuracy of fifteen digits". This could
enable the development of extremely accurate clocks and improved satellite-
based navigation systems (GPS), as well as the study of the constants of nature
over time.




Theodor W. Haensch









Three Cheers!!!