De Physique Research Articles

Chemistry in France: A Hotbed for New Schools of Thought

How is chemistry standing in the land of Lavoisier, while we re celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Paul Sabatier and Victor Grignard, within a rapidly changing higher education and research landscape? France has a long-standing tradition of research and innovation in chemistry, and its chemical industry (ranked fifth in the world) is still a strong pillar of French economic development. More than 3300 chemical companies directly employ 200000 people (inducing 600000 indirect jobs). Most of these are small or medium companies, together with some large industrial groups such as Total, Arkema, Rhodia, Michelin, and Air Liquide. This strong industrial activity has generated, in the first part of the 20th century, the foundation of several chemistry and chemical engineering graduate schools all over the country, attracting very good students educated as chemical engineers to amasters level. On the academic side, some 5300 researchers and 2700 technical staff work in chemistry laboratories and teams, located in the most important French academic cities. All of the main research topics are addressed in the core of chemical science and in all of its interfaces with physics (such as materials science, nanosciences, soft matter, spectroscopies), life sciences (medicinal chemistry, bioinspired chemistry, structural biology), and engineering (optoelectronic devices, energy storage, metallurgy).

De l’atelier au laboratoire: Recherche et innovation dans l’industrie électrique, XIX e –XX e siècles (review)

Reviewed by: De l’atelier au laboratoire: Recherche et innovation dans l’industrie électrique, XIXe–XXe siècles Andrew Butrica (bio) De l’atelier au laboratoire: Recherche et innovation dans l’industrie électrique, XIXe–XXe siècles. Edited by Yves Bouvier et al. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011. Pp. 141. $38.95. The goal of this slim installment in Peter Lang’s History of Energy series is to explore the nature and loci of electrical industry invention, innovation, research, and development and to challenge the accepted view of nineteenth-century lone inventor-geniuses and twentieth-century richly endowed corporate laboratories. It substantively broadens and deepens the work of Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini’s Laboratories, Workshops, and Sites: Concepts and Practices of Research in Industrial Europe, 1800–1914 (1999). The contributions represent revisions of half the papers read at a [End Page 933] December 2005 conference in Mulhouse, France, the other half appearing in a 2007 issue of Annales historiques de l’électricité. The authors of the six articles succeed superbly in relocating and redefining industrial research. W. Bernard Carlson, in a study of Nikola Tesla’s AC motor and wireless transmission of high-frequency power, argues the case for the inventor’s advantages over big firms, advantages that arise from being unhampered by the constraints of production and marketing. Tesla exemplified Joseph Schumpeter’s separation of invention and development by allying himself with promoters and selling or licensing his patents rather than establishing manufacturing plants. Alain Cortat analyzes Swiss cable-making firms in the context of a national (eventually international) cartel. Research and quality control evolved side-by-side until their separation during the 1930s. The firms overcame their small size and limited finances to innovate by purchasing patents from industrial groups (Bell, Siemens, Philips), collaborating with universities and technical schools, and contracting research with the Battelle Institute (1960s). Serge Paquier reminds the reader in a study of long-distance electrical power transmission that not all research took place indoors. Building up to the Frankfurt electrical exposition of 1891 (and so accenting the importance of these expositions for technological advance), Paquier focuses on hydroelectric installations as laboratories “hors les murs.” In an inquiry on the Toulouse electrical engineering laboratory (LGET), Marie-Pierre Bès calls attention to the critical role played by government policy and sponsorship in France between 1955 and 1985. The research carried out legitimated a nascent discipline in applied science and served the needs of industry (chiefly the electric monopoly EDF) with public underwriting largely from the Ministry of Industry and Research, the CNRS, and research agencies in the critical space, telecommunications, and nuclear sectors. The research never led to patents or the conception of new products or processes, but did fulfill the electrical industry’s strategic needs. Graeme Gooday revisits Marie Sklodowska Curie’s original contribution to the science and fabrication of permanent steel magnets (which too often proved to lack permanence), underwritten by the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale in the 1890s and carried out in the Sorbonne and École de physique et de chimie. His main attention is on the received notion in “narrow folklore” (p. 107) that Sydney Evershed in 1920 and 1925 solved the permanent magnet problem and established their manufacture on a scientific basis through decades of designing and redesigning electrical instruments. Here British trade secrecy collided with (and obscured) the results of Curie’s science-based open and systematic approach that relied on an assortment of samples donated by industry. Gabriel Galvez-Behar tackles Clément Ader, a telegraph, telephone, and automobile innovator too often associated solely with aeronautics. He [End Page 934] focuses on Ader’s changing contractual relationships with the Société générale des téléphones and the Société industrielle des téléphones to provide patentable inventions on demand. Ader successfully and simultaneously performed aeronautical research for the army because he operated as an “inventor entrepreneur” (like Edison) acting as both inventor (and insisting that his name be on all patents) and an entrepreneur who managed multiple research teams working on different problems (telephony, air transport, automobiles) at separate locations. A firm’s lack...

An off-line method to characterize the fission product release from uranium carbide-target prototypes developed for SPIRAL2 project

In the context of radioactive ion beams, fission targets, often based on uranium compounds, have been used for more than 50years at isotope separator on line facilities. The development of several projects of second generation facilities aiming at intensities two or three orders of magnitude higher than today puts an emphasis on the properties of the uranium fission targets. A study, driven by Institut de Physique Nucléaire d’Orsay (IPNO), has been started within the SPIRAL2 project to try and fully understand the behavior of these targets. In this paper, we have focused on five uranium carbide based targets. We present an off-line method to characterize their fission product release and the results are examined in conjunction with physical characteristics of each material such as the microstructure, the porosity and the chemical composition.

Honors

Pascal Richet, a faculty member of the Physique des Minéraux et des Magmas, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, has been selected as the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award. Given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, this award is conferred in recognition of lifetime achievements in research.

SWIMMING HELPS SIMULATED TURTLES STAY ON COURSE

Pitched against the mighty North Atlantic, it would seem that newly hatched loggerhead turtles would stand little chance of influencing their destiny. Perceived wisdom held that after swimming from their home beach the youngsters got picked up by the powerful currents circulating in the North Atlantic, where they could spend as much as the next 15 years being carried around the ocean. However, Nathan Putman and Ken Lohmann from the University of North Carolina, USA, were less sure. Together with other colleagues, they had already shown that simulations of the magnetic field from various locations in the North Atlantic affected the tiny animals’ choice of direction, with the minute migrants selecting the best orientation to keep them in the circulating current. However, many ecologists did not believe that the hatchlings’ efforts could influence their North Atlantic odyssey. Intrigued, Putman and Lohmann decided to take a computational approach; they set millions of cyber-turtles loose in a simulated North Atlantic to find out how much they affect their own course (p. 1863).‘We wanted an ocean model that would depict weather events that were forced using wind, so getting a model that was very fine scale was important for those fine scale little animals’, says Putman. So, the duo teamed up with oceanographer Thomas Shay from the University of North Carolina, USA, to simulate 5 years of ocean circulation. Then, having successfully constructed their cyber-ocean, they had to figure out how to simulate the turtle voyagers. ‘We came across Philippe Verley, who devised this wonderful software that was called ICTHYOP that was designed to study the movement of fish larvae’, explains Putman. Visiting Verley at the Laboratoire de Physique des Océans in France, Putman and Verely discussed how they could convert the fish simulations into turtles migrating through the ocean. After a number of modifications to the software, Putman was ready to set hundreds of thousands of simulated turtle hatchlings loose in the cyber-ocean.Setting the youngsters to swim for 1, 2 or 3 h per day at 0.2 m s–1, the program allowed the turtles to drift with the current for the remainder of the day. Then, when the turtles entered specified regions of the ocean, the program allocated them a swimming direction in roughly the same orientation that the young turtles had selected in the laboratory. ‘We were interested in modelling realistic navigation behaviour so we wanted a wide spread of around 80 deg around the directions that the hatchlings had picked’, explains Putman.After months of computation and analysis, the duo realised that even the most minimal amount of swimming had affected the simulated hatchlings’ trajectories. Comparing the swimming turtles with simulations of turtles that drifted exclusively, the duo could see that the courses of the swimming turtles were less dispersed than those of the turtles that had been cast purely to the sea. ‘The swimming behaviour seemed to be compensating for the tendency of dispersion. It’s like the turtles were swimming to make the currents approximate what we see in the textbooks’, says Putman.Having found that swimming for even a tiny fraction of a day could help the simulated turtles stay on course, the duo is keen to track the progress of recently embarked hatchlings to find out how much of an impact swimming makes in practice. ‘The plan is to put tiny little tags on turtles. We’ll know where the turtle goes, but it won’t tell us if they are swimming or drifting, so we’ll look at the ocean circulation models along the turtles’ paths and subtract the current velocity to determine when they are swimming’, explains Putman.

Erratum to: Lava discharge during Etna’s January 2011 fire fountain tracked using MSG-SEVIRI

In the paper by Gouhier, M., Harris, A., Calvari, S., Labazuy, P., Guehenneux, Y., Donnadieu, F., Valade, S, entitled “Lava discharge during Etna’s January 2011 fire fountain tracked using MSG-SEVIRI” (Bull Volcanol (2012) 74:787–793, DOI 10.1007/s00445-011-0572-y), we present data from a Doppler radar (VOLDORAD 2B). This ground-based Lband radar has been monitoring the eruptive activity of the summit craters of Mt. Etna in real-time since July 2009 from a site about 3.5 km SSE of the craters. Examples of applications of this type of radar are reviewed by Donnadieu (2012) and shown on the VOLDORAD website (http://wwwobs. univbpclermont.fr/SO/televolc/voldorad/). Although designed and owned by the Observatoire de Physique du Globe in Clermont-Ferrand (OPGC), France, VOLDORAD 2B is operated jointly with the INGV-Catania (Italy) in the framework of a technical and scientific collaboration agreement between the INGV of Catania, the French CNRS and the OPGC-Universite Blaise Pascal in ClermontFerrand. The system also utilizes a dedicated micropatch antenna designed at the University of Calabria (Boccia et al. 2010) and owned by INGV. The objective of the joint acquisition of the radar data by INGV-Catania and the OPGC is twofold: (1) to mitigate volcanic risks at Etna by better assessing the hazards arising from ash plumes and (2) to allow detailed study of volcanic activity and its environmental impact. In the paper by Gouhier et al. (2012), we failed to highlight this important collaboration between the INGV Catania and the OPGC; a cooperation essential for the past, current and future generation of such valuable data sets. Specifically we wish to acknowledge the roles of Mauro Coltelli, Michele Prestifilippo and Simona Scollo for their important input into this project, and pivotal role in setting up, and maintaining, this collaborative deployment.

Abstracts of the 17th International Symposium on Bioluminescence and Chemiluminescence ‐ (ISBC 2012)

WARNING : The light-emitting molecular structures responsible for the chemiluminescence and fluorescence phenomena are not necessarily the same!

From Friedel Oscillations and Kondo Effect to the Pseudogap in Cuprates

One of the great achievements performed by Jacques Friedel in France has been to promote experimental activities on the electronic properties in condensed matter physics, which has led him, among others, to be an active promoter of the up-rise of the "Laboratoire de Physique des Solides" (LPS). A selective presentation of some of the work achieved in my Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) group allows me to underline the importance of the initial choices done by J. Friedel for the LPS. I give here an updated review of the work done on Kondo effect in the 1970's which has allowed me to enlighten the real interest of the NMR probe as a local experimental technique to visualize the perturbation brought by impurities in normal metals. In a second part I summarize the early NMR experiments done in the high Tc cuprates which have given evidence for the existence of strong electronic correlations and established the occurrence of the "pseudogap", on which I have initially had some exchanges with J. Friedel. The pseudogap, occurring below a temperature T*, has during the last twenty years raised endless discussions about the incidence of correlations on superconductivity. Many researchers are still advocating today that the pseudogap is due to the existence of preformed pairs above Tc. Its robustness to impurities and disorder that we evidenced from the early days rather suggested that it results from a competing order of the correlated state. This is apparently better accepted nowadays, although various distinct ordered states detected below T* are not yet understood. I also underline the large contrast between the scientific behaviours which prevailed between these two periods of scientific activity. I suggest that these changes might have a negative incidence, in my opinion, on the research and education system, at least in our field of science.

Binary Phase Diagram of Water/Brij58 Studied by SAXS

Laboratoire de Physique de l’Etat Condense, UMR CNRS 6087, Universite du Maine 72085 Le Mans Cedex 09, France The phase diagram of the binary water/Brij58 system has been studied at constant temperature T = 20 ◦C first by simple optical observation and then by small angle X-ray scattering. The small angle X-ray scattering patterns in the isotropic diluted phase are analyzed in a quantitative way by refining the experimental measurements with a model assuming hard spherical micelles in interaction. The micelles are described by a poly dispersed core-shell model and the interaction by the Perkus–Yevick hard-sphere model. The fitted parameters are analyzed in detail to determine the way polyoxyethylene blocks are hydrated with respect to the volumic fraction of water. In the more concentrated regime, the crystalline phases that are identified are the Fm3m cubic, the 2D hexagonal and the lamellar phases. The structural parameters that describe each phases are analyzed and commented. The small angle X-ray scattering study is complemented by the determination of the temperature dependent liquid–solid transition by rheology.

Imaging the Experiments on Respiration and Transpiration of Lavoisier and Séguin: Two Unknown Drawings by Madame Lavoisier

This paper presents two hitherto unknown drawings by Marie-Anne-Pierrette Lavoisier dating to the early 1790s that illustrate the experiments on respiration and transpiration of her husband Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his assistant Armand Séguin. These works may be associated with the well-known sepia drawings that were published for the first time by Edouard Grimaux in 1888. Details contained in these newly discovered drawings by M.me Lavoisier provide fresh evidence as to the nature and aims of Lavoisier's innovative experiments. As we will show, these drawings were intended to illustrate the collection of papers on respiration being prepared by Lavoisier for his Mémoires de physique et de chimie (1792-1805).

<em>Communicating Physics: The Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot's Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887</em>, by Josep Simon

Reviewed by: Communicating Physics: The Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot’s Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887 Matthew Stanley (bio) Communicating Physics: The Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot’s Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887, by Josep Simon; pp. xi + 302. London and Brookfield: Pickering & Chatto, 2011, £60.00, $99.00. Decades ago, Thomas S. Kuhn declared that one of the most powerful tools for propagating scientific paradigms was also the most humble: the textbook. This key role of education and textbooks in science has only recently become a subject of interest in the history of science, and Josep Simon’s Communicating Physics takes up this project with great energy. He argues that by focusing on not just the content of textbooks, but also their production and distribution, we can recast the story of the formation of nineteenth-century physics from below. In this way, he says, we see that discipline as being formed not only by famous physicists, but also by teachers, industrial researchers, technicians, publishers, and readers. Simon pursues this goal by focusing on one of the most successful physics textbooks of the century, Adolphe Ganot’s Traité élémentaire de physique expèrimentale et appliquée (1851), and its English translation by Edmund Atkinson (1863). He notes that textbooks in general only became a standard part of teaching in the nineteenth century, a development that was largely the result of the emergence of national structures of education and examination. This coincided with the rapid expansion of science education, and Simon argues that a major force behind the establishment of physics as a discipline was the design of textbooks to cater to secondary and medical education (and associated examinations). Communicating Physics makes the case that such textbooks were not simple repositories of theoretical knowledge, but were instead the result of complicated material cultures, business networks, and pedagogical agendas. Ganot made his book successful by drawing on his own teaching experience, local engraving skill, and cutting-edge research—while at the same time including practice exam questions (then a novel idea) and keeping it half the length of competing books. It was marketed by the Baillière bookseller network, whose active involvement in the project is shown to be a major force in the book’s formation and financial success. Simon provides an extraordinarily detailed narrative of the creation of both the Traité and its English translation, always emphasizing the many material and commercial processes at work. He argues that these texts provided distinct kinds of physics: Ganot’s physics was predominantly applied and experimental, with great emphasis on instruments and [End Page 531] procedure. Atkinson’s, on the other hand, was more mathematical and tailored for English audiences. Simon aims to make significant changes to the historiography of physics, particularly to upset the usual nation-oriented periodizations. It is useful to see the ways in which a text becomes influential in different national contexts, but Communicating Physics does not significantly upset the existing historiography. Similarly, it is not the first to investigate the role of education in the development of physics, though it is a useful addition to the work of Andrew Warwick and David Kaiser. The book falls short of its ambition to show that Ganot’s text was an important part of the formation of nineteenth-century physics. Its widespread use is made clear, and it is very interesting to see the ways in which it was used by researchers in their work. Strangely, however, we see very little about its effects on or appropriations by the students who used it. Ganot may have had a coherent vision of physics, but was it passed on to his readers? How did exposure to that text’s view of physics shape the discipline? Simon’s claim that the text had a widespread impact on the field ends up being underdeveloped. It is left implicit that students took away important ideas or methods from the textbook—a surprisingly passive view of student readership that brings us back to Kuhn’s description of textbooks as tools of indoctrination. Communicating Physics succeeds in making the case that nineteenth-century physics pedagogy was a “collective enterprise” that involved...

Quest for consistency, symmetry, and simplicity — The legacy of Albert Tarantola

On 6 December 2009, the distinguished Spanish-French physicist and geoscientist, Albert Tarantola, passed away at the age of 60. Born in Barcelona in 1949, he went to Paris where he lived most of his life, and worked as a professor at Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. His extensive scientific production and remarkable achievements in inverse problem theory and geophysical data analysis established him as one of the most influential mathematical geoscientists of our time. He became the father of probabilistic inverse theory, a theory that he passionately defended against severe criticism and managed to propagate to a major part of the geophysical community. Another major achievement was his contributions to the theory of seismic waveform inversion—a work that right now is unfolding its potential in large-scale computations. Albert’s contributions were not limited to geoscience. He started his career in astrophysics, and later in his life he wrote several papers and books on physics and probability, including new formulations of fluid dynamics, elasticity theory, global positioning, and scientific inference. Albert possessed a unique combination of exceptional skills and remarkable mental energy. He was a veritable powerhouse with an unusual work ethic, and his passion for science will remain an ideal for all those who worked with him.

System Dynamics Control through the Fractal Potential

A. Timofte, I. Casian Botez, D. Scurtu and M. Agop Faculty of Physics, “Al. I. Cuza” University, Iasi 700050, Romania Faculty of Electronics and Telecomunications, “Gh. Asachi” Technical University, Iasi 700514, Romania Department of Fluid Mechanics, “Gh. Asachi” Technical University, Iasi 700514, Romania Department of Physics, University of Athens, Athens 15771, Greece Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers, Atomes et Molecules, Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Lasers

Editorial: A new year and a new Associate Editor

Biomicrofluidics continued to experience another year of growth in 2010, both in terms of the number of papers published and, more importantly, their quality. We are particularly encouraged by the strong jump in the journal’s impact factor from 2.318 in 2008 to 2.895 in 2009, and are working hard to maintain a steady upward trend. There is no doubt in our minds that this is largely due to the continued support we have received from the microfluidics and nanofluidics community and we would like to thank our readers, authors, and reviewers for your contribution in various forms to the journal. As we write, we have just returned from the Second Advances for Microfluidics and Nanofluidics and Asia-Pacific Lab-on-Chip Conference (AMN-APLOC) in Singapore, which was sponsored by Biomicrofluidics. We are pleased to have seen many of our readers and authors at the conference, which has certainly grown in stature from the first AMN meeting in Hong Kong in January 2009, and we hope to see many more of you at the next meeting, which will be held in Dalian, China in mid-2012. The AMN-APLOC conference in Singapore also saw the launch of the Small Matters video contest and we will be announcing the opening of the next round soon, the winners of which will be announced in Dalian in 2012. In a field where visualization of various phenomena at small length scales and short time scales is crucial, multimedia plays an important role in the ability for authors to communicate results effectively and in a manner that creates impact. Therefore, we would like to encourage our readers and authors to include multimedia as part of your submission and invite you to participate in the contest. All multimedia that constitute part of the submission to the journal are included in our video gallery, and this collection is already freely available online athttp://bmf.aip.org/features/video_gallery. It is our aim that such a resource be made freely available to the public, with the hope of promoting and advancing the field, as well as constituting a pedagogical tool for use by instructors in undergraduate and graduate classes. The Methods and Fabrication section continues to grow since its launch in June 2010 with 13 articles published following its inception. Again, we see this as a valuable resource to students and researchers, particularly in building upon existing protocols in furthering micro∕nanofluidic science and technology as well as advancing micro∕nanofabrication techniques themselves. Thus, we would like to urge more researchers to share your fabrication and laboratory protocols with the wider community in the interest of advancing science, reducing duplication of effort, and lowering research costs. In recognition of our continued readership and authorship growth in the Asia-Pacific region and our ongoing strive to further improve the journal, we have appointed Professor Jianhua Qin as a new Associate Editor to the journal. Professor Qin, who has previously served on our Editorial Board, is currently the Director of the Microfluidics Research Center at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and plays a prominent leading role in microfluidics in the region. Her research which interfaces technology, biology, and medicine is widely respected within the community and currently encompasses the development of miniaturized tools to aid the study of cancer biology, tissue vascularization, and stem cells in addition to the design of new diagnostic, therapeutic, and high throughput screening strategies at the cellular and organism level. Of particular significance is her effort to use microfluidics to understand cell interactions and the interplay between different cell types within the tumor milieu by recreating its microenvironment in vitro. In addition, Professor Qin’s work is also aimed at investigating the effect of mechanical forces and the role of various combinatorial factors in the regulation of stem cell differentiation and lineage commitment. Finally, we welcome the addition of the following to our Editorial Board: Professor Justin Cooper-White (University of Queensland, Australia), Professor Kwan Hyoung Kwan (Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea), Professor Frieder Mugele (University of Twente, The Netherlands), Professor Alexander Revzin (University of California, San Diego, USA), Professor Patrick Tabeling (Ecole Superieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles de Paris, France), and Professor Hongkai Wu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong). We are honored to have such a distinguished group of researchers on the board and look forward to working with them as well as our readers, authors, and reviewers to takeBiomicrofluidics to new heights.

The vacuum magnetic birefringence experiment: a test for quantum electrodynamicsThis paper was presented at the International Conference on Precision Physics of Simple Atomic Systems, held at École de Physique, les Houches, France, 30 May – 4 June, 2010.

In this contribution to PSAS 2010 we describe the status of the BMV experiment whose goal is to measure the vacuum magnetic birefringence that would represent a pure test for quantum electrodynamics. We present our latest experimental data obtained from Cotton–Mouton measurements of different gases.

Obituary: Jacques Labeyrie (1920–2011)

After more than 50 years dedicated to scientific research and to the dissemination of knowledge, Dr Jacques Labeyrie recently passed away at the age of 91. Upon graduating from the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielle de la Ville de Paris (1940–43), he became the assistant to Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Collège de France. With Joliot's recommendation, he was recruited in 1946 to the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA), where he stayed until his retirement in 1985. He was named Head of the Section d'Electronique Physique (later known as the Service d'Electronique Physique) of the CEA in 1955, which he managed until 1982.

The two-photon approximation for the four-photon decay of the 4d excited state in hydrogenThis paper was presented at the International Conference on Precision Physics of Simple Atomic Systems, held at École de Physique, les Houches, France, 30 May – 4 June, 2010.

The method of two-photon approximation for multiphoton decay is applied to the decay of the 4d state in the hydrogen atom. In the process of four-photon decay the two-photon contribution that leads to radiation escape, from the interaction with matter, is considered. This may be helpful for a strict description of the recombination process in the hydrogen atom and, in principle, for the history of hydrogen recombination in the early universe.

Continuous Lyman-alpha generation by four-wave mixing in mercury for laser cooling of antihydrogenThis paper was presented at the International Conference on Precision Physics of Simple Atomic Systems, held at École de Physique, les Houches, France, 30 May – 4 June, 2010.

Cooling antihydrogen atoms is important for future experiments both to test the fundamental CPT symmetry by high resolution laser spectroscopy and also to measure the gravitational acceleration of antimatter. Laser cooling of antihydrogen can be done on the strong 1S–2P transition at the wavelength of Lyman-alpha (121.6 nm). A continuous wave laser at the Lyman-alpha wavelength based on solid-state fundamental lasers is described. By using a two-photon and a near one-photon resonance a scan across the whole phase matching curve of the four-wave mixing process is possible. Furthermore the influence of the beam profile of one fundamental beam on the four-wave mixing process is studied.

From first principles of QED to an application: hyperfine structure of P states of muonic hydrogenThis paper was presented at the International Conference on Precision Physics of Simple Atomic Systems, held at École de Physique, les Houches, France, 30 May – 4 June, 2010.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we attempt to give a brief overview of the different application areas of quantum electrodynamics (QED). These include fundamental physics (prediction of atomic energy levels), where the atom may be exposed to additional external fields (hyperfine splitting and g factor). We also mention QED processes in highly intense laser fields and more applied areas like Casimir and Casimir–Polder interactions. Both the unifying aspects as well as the differences in the the theoretical treatment required by these application areas (such as the treatment of infinities) are highlighted. Second, we discuss an application of the formalism in the fundamentally interesting area of the prediction of energy levels, namely, the hyperfine structure of P states of muonic hydrogen.

Theoretical progress in the H2+ molecular ion: towards electron to proton mass ratio determinationThis paper was presented at the International Conference on Precision Physics of Simple Atomic Systems, held at École de Physique, les Houches, France, 30 May – 4 June, 2010.

High resolution ro-vibrational spectroscopy of H 2+ or HD+ can lead to a significantly improved determination of the electron to proton mass ratio me/mp if the theoretical determination of transition frequencies becomes sufficiently accurate. We report on recent theoretical progress in the description of the hyperfine structure of H 2+ , as well as first steps in the evaluation of radiative corrections at order mα7. Completion of the latter calculation should allow us to reach the projected 10−10 accuracy level and open the road to mass ratio determination.