News

EPJ B – Round-up on the conductivity of carbon nanomaterials

Details: Published on 11 May 2011

An 8-unit-cell long (10, 0) CNT end-contacted with Au(111) metallic electrodes

A new Colloquium article by I. Deretzis and A. La Magna published in EPJB reviews the possibilities offered by all-carbon electronics as well as elucidating drawbacks in view of future applications.

Jean Daillant nominated new Director General of SOLEIL

Details: Published on 02 May 2011

Congratulations to Prof Jean Daillant, member of the EPJ Steering Committee, on his recent appointment as Director General of SOLEIL, the French national synchrotron facility.

EPJ B – New theory predicts dispersion in porous solids

Details: Published on 08 April 2011

Modeling the transport of fluids in porous solids is a problem of general interest for its implications in construction engineering, industrial catalysis, hydrology, agriculture and geology. The classical approach uses an equation derived from continuum mechanics which is problematic and often gives incorrect predictions. When the porous medium presents many scales of variability the problem becomes intractable.

EPJ E - Unlocking jams in fluid materials

Details: Published on 08 April 2011

A new theoretical model which helps to understand how to best avoid jamming of soft matter.

In a study recently published in the European Physical Journal E (EPJE), a German scientist constructed a theoretical model to understand how to best avoid jamming of soft matter that can be applied in food and cosmetics production.

EPJ H - Cosmic Rays: a (partly) untold story

Details: Published on 04 April 2011

EPJ A – Validating Aspects of the Strong-Coupling Regime of QCD — Domenico Pacini in May 1910 (32 years old) while making a measurement. (Courtesy of the Pacini family.)

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

Details: 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

Details: Published on 30 March 2011

Interaction control in a trapped Fermi-Fermi mixture of ⁶Li and ⁴⁰K atoms via a magnetically tuned Feshbach resonance.

(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

Details: Published on 28 March 2011

Modeling the formation of alkali clusters attached to helium nanodroplets and the abundance of high-spin states

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

Details: 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

Details: 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.