New Field Of Physics Research Articles

The giant cancer tube and the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory

Fifty years ago the W. K. Kellogg Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology was founded as a center of radiation therapy. Seven years later it abandoned medicine to pursue its development into what is today an internationally known center of nuclear physics. The behind‐the‐scenes negotiations surrounding the laboratory's founding, early history and abrupt change in direction give unusual insight into the administrative style of Robert A. Millikan, Caltech's chief executive. The early history of the laboratory was shaped in important ways by this Nobel Prize winning physicist's successes and failures in raising support money. His efforts, including a 13‐year long attempt to take a horse farm away from the University of California, reveal why Millikan was so successful as head of Caltech, and show that it was just as difficult then to get support for pure research in a new field of physics as it is today.

Crystal structures with asymmetric and off-centre atoms

Abstract The conventional description of the physical behaviour of crystalline solids is based very largely upon the harmonic approximation, the validity of which is generally assumed to improve with decreasing temperature. For many years, only a few substances like ferroelectric BaTiO3 have appeared exceptions to this approach. During the last decade however, the application of modern physical techniques of analysis to some of the simpler crystallographic systems has revealed that low temperature anharmonicity is more common than had been realized. It has been established for example, that small impurity ions such as Li+ incorporated into KCl or KBr do not simply substitute for K+ but occupy off-centre positions and that this is quite directly a consequence of a potential well with a shallow maximum at the conventional lattice site together with the small size of Li+. Recent progress has been particularly stimulated by the discovery that similar anharmonic conditions may be of significance for high transition temperature superconductivity and for the magnetic behaviour of ferrite materials. Theoretically, many difficulties remain but the growing technological importance of this new field in physics seems likely to lead to increasing interest in the future.

A Discussion on the early days of ionospheric research and the theory of electric and magnetic waves in the ionosphere and magnetosphere - Trends in early ionospheric research in Germany

If one is asked to contribute an historical account on the occasion of an anniversary, as I see it there are two possible approaches: either to give a survey of the facts as completely as possible or to base the contribution on personal recollections which is of course much more subjective and somewhat more lively. The former I have tried to do in my written contribution to the 50th Anniversary of the Discovery of the Ionosphere in J. appl. terr. Phys , and in this paper I should like to attempt the second approach. When Appleton made his famous discovery, I was still a schoolboy but nevertheless already interested in radio propagation and what was then called the Heaviside layer. Having been a broadcast listener since 1924, and a real ‘ham ’ since 1925, I had experienced the queer propagation phenomena that occurs on medium and short waves. When I entered the Technical University at Munich in 1926, I soon became confronted in Zenneck’s institute with the literature on this new field of physics. By good fortune, Zenneck was editor of the periodical that was then called Jahrbuch der drahtlosen Telegraphie and his abstracts of the pertinent publication in the Proc. Inst Radio Engrs, Proc. R. Soc. Lond . A and The Electrician , were famous for their conciseness and clarity. Having been educated at a Bavarian humanistic Gymnasium, I had learnt Latin, Greek and French, but no English, and for this reason Zenneck’s abstracts were very helpful to me.