Century old mystery solved
Invar has a face-centred cubic structure and is composed of about 65% iron and 35% nickel. In addition to its anomalously low thermal expansion, the alloy also has unusual elastic, thermal and magneti...
Bubble breakthrough for magnets
Fukumura and colleagues used a scanning Hall probe microscope to study the formation of the bubbles. The compound that they studied is unusual in that its magnetic structure changes markedly with temp...
Quantum physics breakthrough wins Nobel Prize
Two of the physicists, Horst L. Störmer from Columbia University, New York, and Daniel C. Tsui, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, discovered the effect – called the fractional qu...
Magnetic superglue promotes superconductivity
The Cambridge team studied two heavy fermion compounds: CeIn3 and CePd2Si2. Heavy fermion compounds are materials in which the conduction electrons acquire masses hundreds of times those of free elect...
Tera-byte disk drives
The device works by storing the data as regions of electric charge. The charge is trapped within a thin dielectric layer coated onto a conducting platter. The hard drive reads and writes data using fi...
Magnetic heat engines
Magnetic heat engines have been known about since 1889, but the success of gas engines has largely prevented research into this technology. Magnetic engines work by converting heat directly into elect...
Glass floppy disks?
Aluminium alloys are widely used as a substrate in magnetic disks, but the demand for higher storage and faster access times require better materials. A replacement material would need to offer a thin...
ESF General Assembly: new image, new physics and new secretary general
A number of new research projects in physics were also announced and Enric Banda, former secretary of state for universities and research in Spain, was confirmed as the foundation’s next secreta...
