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APS NEWS May 2007 •  May 2007 Volume 16, No. 5 www.aps.org/publications/apsnews APS NEWS Highlights Climate Change is All About Energy A PUBLICATION OF THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY • WWW.apS.ORG/PUBLICATIONS/apSNEWS on page 8 Franklin’s Secret Message Revealed Reliving the Good Old Days of Superconductivity Twenty years after the Wood- and Alex Muller, at IBM Zurich, Cu-O compound. Initially they had stock of Physics session at the 1987 made their discovery of a lantha- seen only hints of superconductiv- APS March Meeting in which re- num-based cuprate perovskite that ity, and colleagues were skeptical searchers presented results on re- superconducts at 35K. that this unlikely ceramic compound cently discovered high temperature At the 2007 March Meeting, would superconduct. By October superconductors, many of the sci- Bednorz recounted how he and 1986, however, they had found the entists involved returned to speak Muller had worked for months on optimum composition and had ob- at the 2007 March Meeting. They the project before making the dis- served that the material exhibited reminisced about that exciting time covery. They were working with the Meissner effect, considered de- and commented on progress since copper oxides, rather than conven- finitive proof that the compound then. tional metallic alloys, and had tried was superconducting, and they sent This year also marks the 50th an- material after material with no suc- their paper off for publication. They niversary of the BCS theory of su- cess. It was frustrating at times, but won the Nobel Prize in 1987. perconductivity. Speakers at a spe- they kept going, Bednorz said dur- What made the discovery so ex- Photo by Ken Cole All the classes that had correctly deciphered Ben Franklin’s secret message cial evening session at the March ing the 2007 press conference. “We citing, said Bednorz, was that super- were entered in the drawing for the PhysicsQuest grand prize (see story Meeting spoke about the history and didn’t know whether it would be conductivity had been known about below). APS Executive Officer Judy Franz (left) picked the winner out of the impact of that theory. successful.” So he and Muller kept and studied for decades, since Ka- drum as Head of Public Outreach Jessica Clark looked on. The events leading up to the the work low key, working after merlingh Onnes first discovered the “French help arriving soon mystery centered on Benjamin Woodstock of Physics conference hours, using colleagues’ equipment. phenomenon in 1911. “The excite- in America.” That was the cor- Franklin, in celebration of the began in 1986 when Georg Bednorz Finally, they hit upon a La-Ba- SUPERCONDUCTIVITY cont. on 3 rectly decoded (fictional) mes- 300th anniversary of his birth. sage from Ben Franklin that The kit included materials and Physicists Present Latest Results in Graphene Maya Lampic’s sixth grade class instructions for four experiments and Metamaterials Research found when they had completed inspired by Franklin’s work with APS’s PhysicsQuest 2006 learn- lenses, electricity, and heat ab- Cutting-edge research on new condition, the material’s electric a process in which a thin flat panel ing adventure. Their correct an- sorption. Each experiment gave materials is a major focus of the permittivity must be negative, and of the metamaterial would be able to swer, and a little luck, won them students a clue they needed to annual APS March Meeting, and in some cases, also its magnetic per- image an object at a spatial resolu- the grand prize: an iPod shuffle decode the secret message. the 2007 conference in Denver was meability. tion better than the wavelength of for each student, as well as some However, a typo in the man- no exception. Among the more in- Metamaterials made their debut the illuminating light. Ever since other prizes for the class. ual caused some classes to come teresting highlights was a series of at the APS March meeting in 2000. metamaterials were first realized The 20 sixth grade girls from up with the message, “American papers reporting new results in the At the time, only a couple of re- in the laboratory, physicists have Chicago were among thousands delicacies I now miss especial- areas of metamaterials–also known search groups were working in this been pushing the boundary of these of middle school students who ly.” APS accepted either answer as “left-handed materials”–and gra- area; today there are dozens inves- “left-handed” materials to shorter have decoded the message as as correct. phene. tigating ways to exploit the unique and shorter wavelengths. part of PhysicsQuest, APS’s Last fall, 8700 kits were sent Metamaterials are amalgams properties of these materials to pro- Shalaev and his colleagues have mystery-based science kit for to 2120 teachers (teachers could of tiny rods, strips and rings that duce perfect lensing and other odd reported a negative-index material middle school students. Those register more than one class). exhibit a negative index of refrac- optical properties. operating at a wavelength of 770 classes that submitted the correct Kits are free to teachers who re- tion, thanks to their unusual, na- At the APS meeting in Denver, nm, the shortest yet observed for a answers were entered in a ran- quest them. By the March 2 dead- noscale-engineered architecture, Purdue University’s Vladimir Sha- single-negative material (exhibiting dom drawing to win prizes. line, 900 classes had submitted which enhances the magnetic in- laev reported on a new record-set- only negative permittivity). Using The 2006 PhysicsQuest PHYSICSQUEST cont. on page 7 teraction between light and matter. ting metamaterial that might be the same material with a different To bring about a negative-index ideal for so-called “superlensing”: GRAPHENE cont. on page 6 Session Explores New Sources of Oil and Gas Heavy oils and natural gas hy- 1983, can be found on the sea floor March Prize and Award Recipients drates, which exist in vast reserves, near the coasts and underneath the could potentially become a sig- arctic tundra. Earth contains vastly nificant source of energy, but these more natural gas in hydrates than in resources are much more difficult conventional natural gas, said Collett and expensive to produce than con- in a press conference at the March ventional sources of oil and natural Meeting. “Hydrates are a very large, gas. At a March Meeting session on known source of natural gas,” he the future of fossil fuels and a related said. There has been increasing in- press conference, speakers provided ternational interest in recovering and assessments of these potential alter- using these resources, he said. native sources of oil and natural gas. Several missions have recently Natural gas consumption has explored some of these deposits and been rising rapidly, and is expected to estimated how much natural gas hy- increase 70% by 2025, said Timothy drate they contain. Estimates range Collett of USGS. The United States from 100,000 to 300,000,000 trillion currently consumes about 25 trillion cubic feet of natural gas hydrates on cubic feet of natural gas per year. Earth, compared with 13,000 trillion An alternative could be found in cubic feet of conventional natural gas hydrates, reported Collett. Hy- gas. The US has about 320,000 tril- drates are ice-like solids, in which lion cubic feet of gas hydrates, but water molecules trap the methane only 1200 trillion cubic feet of con- molecules in a cage-like structure. ventional natural gas reserves. Hydrates look a lot like ordinary ice, More research is underway to but they burn when lit with a match. assess more accurately how much Like conventional natural gas, hydrate natural gas exists and how most gas hydrates are methane- much of it might be recoverable, Photo by Cronin Photography based, and thus produce relatively Collett said. Front row (l to r): Franz Himpsel, Gabor Somorjai, Mark Kryder, Joel Miller, Arthur Epstein, John King, Edwin L. Gold- clean burning fuel. Burning methane Recovering the gas is challenging, wasser. Middle row (l to r): Uri Haber-Schaim, Chengkun Huang, William Wootters, Daniel Frenkel, Brooks Harris, Allan adds less carbon dioxide to the atmo- but possible. Several research proj- MacDonald, Samuel Bader, Kent Irwin. Back row (l to r): Hugh Churchill, Huanqian Loh, James Eisenstein, Timothy sphere than burning coal or oil. ects have shown that gas hydrates Zwier, Irfan Siddiqi, F. Bary Malik, Steven Girvin, Darrin Pochan, Glenn Fredrickson. Hydrates, first discovered in OIL & GAS continued on page 6 • May 2007 APS NEWS Members in the Media This Month in Physics History “Islands are special. They’re iso- security measures rely on the fact May 1932: Chadwick reports lated from urban predators, and that that computers are not fast enough includes people.’’ to decode information, The Globe the discovery of the neutron Ralph Nobles, on an island in and Mail, April 3, 2007 San Francisco Bay that he thinks “The glass bulb would be red-hot y 1920, physicists knew that most of the mass highly penetrating radiation emitted by the beryl- should be protected, San Francisco in the flame, and then they’d take the Chronicle, March 15, 2007 Bof the atom was located in a nucleus at its cen- lium consisted of high energy photons. Chadwick tube out of their mouth for a moment ter, and that this central core contained protons. In had noticed some odd features of this radiation, and “It seems a little unfair to the peo- and the thing would go, ‘woooo,’ It May 1932 James Chadwick announced that the core began to think it might instead consist of neutral ple whose last names begin with ‘W,’ would just sing to them.” also contained a new uncharged particle, which he particles such as those Rutherford had proposed.
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