News
EPJ H - Cosmic Rays: a (partly) untold story
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- Published on 04 April 2011
The work behind the discovery of cosmic rays, a milestone in science, involved many scientists in Europe and the New World fascinated by the puzzling penetrating radiation, and took place during a period characterized by lack of communication and by nationalism caused primarily by World War I. It took eventually from the turn of the century until 1926 before the extraterrestrial nature of the penetrating radiation was generally accepted.
EPJ D - 'Measurement of Quantum Mechanical Operators' Revisited
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- Published on 31 March 2011
Quantum mechanical measurements are often assumed to be accurate and repeatable. However, due to a fundamental result of Wigner (1952) and Araki and Yanase (1961), we now know that there are limitations to these properties in the presence of aconserved quantity that does not commute with the observable to be measured. Despite its importance and impact on quantum technologies, the full scope of this so-called WAY theorem has remained unclear.
EPJ D - Feshbach resonances in the 6Li-40K Fermi-Fermi mixture: Elastic versus inelastic interactions
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- Published on 30 March 2011
(Cold Quantum Matter - EuroQUAM special issue)
Ultracold mixtures of two fermionic species hold great promise for synthesizing novel types of few and many-body quantum states. Magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances are the key to controlling the interaction in such systems. In this article in EPJD, Naik et al. present a state-of-the-art characterization of Feshbach resonances in the Fermi-Fermi mixture of 6Li-40K atoms, in particular concerning the interplay of both elastic and inelastic scattering.
EPJ D – Nanodroplets make perfect hosts
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- Published on 28 March 2011
Helium nanodroplets provide a unique matrix for the spectroscopy of embedded atom species. In this recent paper in EPJD, Bünermann and Stienkemeier demonstrate a new model of how effects such as droplet shrinking, momentum transfer and cluster desorption affect the pick-up statistics of alkali atoms in helium nanodroplets.
EPJ E - Pierre Gilles De Gennes Prize awarded to Michael E. Cates
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- Published on 24 March 2011
The second edition of the EPJE - Pierre Gilles De Gennes Lecture Prize will be hosted in Vienna, during the 8th Liquid Matter Conference.
EPJ E - Polymersomes made-to-measure
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- Published on 22 March 2011
The use of polymersomes in drug delivery, medical imaging, micro-reactors or to mimic biophysical membrane phenomena is greatly dependent on the extent to which their properties can be controlled and tuned.
EPJ B - Solids under pressure
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- Published on 15 March 2011
Constant-pressure molecular dynamics simulations allow the study of systems where external pressure is a driving force for a structural transformation.
Electrodeposition of an electroactive polymer and subsequent polymerization of monomers is a novel route to anchor polymer chains to electrode surfaces.
Tiny polymer droplets that crystallize on a surface are a shrewd expedient to study the birth of a polymer crystal by the elusive homogeneous nucleation mechanism. In most cases, take for example the dust particle in a snowflake, nucleation starts from a heterogenous defect. Homogenous nucleation is difficult to study because of the prevalence of defects in any bulk sample. Crystallization in small droplets alleviates this difficulty in a manner that is conceptually simple: subdivide the system into more domains than the number of defects. If the domains greatly outnumber the defects then only the homogenous mechanism can induce nucleation in a defect free compartment.
