Physics and Astronomy

The European Space Agency is planning its first mission to unveil the mysteries of Earth`s cloud-shrouded sister planet, Venus. On Wednesday 10 April, Professor Fred Taylor (University of Oxford) will be explaining to the UK National Astronomy Meeting why European scientists are hoping to be on board the Venus Express in 2005.

Venus, the Earth`s nearest planetary neighbour, is remarkably similar in size and mass to our own world. However, its atmosphere and climate could hardly be more diff

New VLT Discovery Pushes Back the Beginnings

Using the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), a team of astronomers from The Netherlands, Germany and the USA [1] have discovered the most distant group of galaxies ever seen, about 13.5 billion light-years away. The Photo shows the sky region near the power

A new type of optical material has been developed by physicists that could replace the electronics used to route the light signals through optical fibre telecommunications networks. It could even provide the basis for future `optical computers` working on light pulses instead of electric signals. At the Condensed Matter conference on Monday 8 April, part of the Institute of Physics Congress in Brighton, Dr David Sharp, a member of Dr Andrew Turberfield`s research team from the University of Oxford, w

When it was announced last month that the Mars Odyssey satellite had found water ice beneath the planet`s frozen carbon dioxide south polar ice cap, “I felt excited!” says Dr Lidija Siller, a physicist from the University of Newcastle. “I believe that the data I have explains how this water got trapped underneath the surface”. Dr Siller will be presenting the results of her research – which involves studying photochemical reactions in ice – at the Condensed Matter physics conference on Monday 8 April

Physicists at Glasgow University are using the world`s most powerful laser beam as an atom smasher to simulate conditions inside the Sun and to produce radioisotopes vital in medicine. Professor Ken Ledingham from the Department of Physics at Glasgow and his colleagues from Imperial College and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) are using the world`s most intense laser beam, produced by the VULCAN laser at the RAL near Oxford, to initiate nuclear reactions for a variety of exciting application

Chalmers researchers in Sweden, in an EU project involving colleagues from France, Holland, Germany, Italy and Finland, have shown that outdata from superconductor quantum computers can be read directly, even though the signal consists only of the presence or absence of two electrons, a so-called Cooper pair.

How far away are we from a functional quantum computer? Research results on quantum computers are beginning to appear. Göran Johansson at the Department of Microelectronics and Nanosci