Thursday, Dec 19 2002
How does your black hole grow?
Like some unstoppable evil in a horror movie, a black hole
constantly feeds and grows. Now, 30 years after that discovery,
researchers can finally describe this inexorable growth
quantitatively. A team publishing in the 23 December print issue of
PRL derives an explicit relationship between the size of a black
hole and the energy it has absorbed. Such knowledge may aid in
computer simulations of black hole mergers, understanding
gravitational wave physics, and other astrophysical studies. (Text courtesy of Physical Review Focus)
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Saturday, Nov 16 2002
New APS Fellows
Four members of Penn State Physics, Sam Finn, Jorge Pullin, Paul Weiss, and Tom Winter, have just been selected as fellows of the American Physical Society.
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Monday, Sep 23 2002
Composite fermions
Composite fermions are electron-vortex bound states, formed in extreme
quantum conditions when electrons are confined to two dimensions and
exposed to a strong magnetic field. They are responsible for many
phenomena, including the fractional quantum Hall effect.
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Tuesday, Aug 20 2002
Avalanche Dynamics in Wet Granular Materials
Professor Schiffer's group has studied the dynamics of avalanching wet granular media in a
rotating drum apparatus, finding novel
avalanche types unique to wet media. They also explored the details of
viscoplastic flow (observed at the highest liquid contents) where lasting contacts during flow establish coherence across the entire
sample and a novel robust pattern formation in the granular surface. (Featured on the cover of Physical Review Letters Online).
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Thursday, Aug 1 2002
Spintronics
Spintronics uses the electron spin (as
opposed to charge) to create new classes of
electronic devices. Professor Samarth's article
on spintronics recently appeared in Scientific
American.
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Tuesday, Jan 1 2002
Nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes are stronger than
diamond, can conduct electricity better
than copper, and may form the basis for
nanometer-scale electronics.
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Tuesday, Sep 3 2002