Nobel Prize In Physics Research Articles

Dynamics of a dielectric microsphere inside a nonlinear laser trap

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the invention of optical trapping and generation of ultrashort pulses, which revolutionized many areas of modern science and technology. However, physics of optical trapping under ultra-short pulsed excitation has not been explored much. The nonlinear nature of optical trapping force/potential under ultra-short pulsed excitation was theoretically investigated, however, without any direct experimental demonstration and development of any generalized theory independent of the particle size. In this work, we present a methodology to numerically estimate trapping force/potential including optical as well as thermal nonlinearity under ultra-short pulsed excitation and implement a variety of detection modalities to capture the particle's real-time trajectories. We show how highly asymmetric nonlinear axial potential, created by a femtosecond pulse-train, can be mapped from the dynamics of the trapped particle. Considering fine-tuning of trap-stiffness by changing nonlinearity, we envision far-reaching applications of using ultra-short pulsed excitation in laser trapping and manipulation.

Black hole researchers win 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three researchers—Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez—for work leading to the discovery of black holes, regions in space imbued with ...

3 researchers win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries related to the darkest secrets of the universe

3 researchers win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries related to the darkest secrets of the universe

Microwave Pioneers: John C. Mather “A Singular Purpose”

This article is the first in a continuing series of biographical pieces on individuals who have made significant and continuous contributions to microwave science, technology, and applications over the course of their careers. It is intended to bring to the reader, especially those new to the field, a portrait of an individual who serves as a role model for the community and a detailed description of their accomplishments. At the same time, it tries to bridge with commonality, the experiences of the subject with those of the scientists, engineers, and technologists who are following in their footsteps or hope to establish a similar record of success. The articles are composed only after an extensive face-to-face interview with the subject and are helped immensely by additional input and editing by the subjects themselves. The focus of this article is Dr. John C. Mather, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, for the first complete measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) blackbody spectrum, and the first confirmed findings of CMB anisotropy. For astronomers and cosmologists at least, these were arguably two of the most important and influential experimental discoveries of the 20th century. For microwave engineers, the satellite mission that Dr. Mather conceived and worked on for more than fifteen years is a crowning achievement in a very large suite of successful microwave science instruments that NASA has developed, built, and delivered to space.

Optical manipulation: a step change for biomedical science

The transfer of optical momentum can exert miniscule but important forces on biological specimens. This area of optical manipulation has been thriving for over 50 years. Its importance was recognised by the award of half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 to Arthur Ashkin for the use of a single focused light beam for manipulation, namely optical tweezers. This article reviews the basic physics of trapping and gives an overview of the basic premise of the field. We particularly focus upon its importance and impact on the biomedical sciences.

Institutional environments and breakthroughs in science. Comparison of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Scientific and/or technical breakthroughs require the exploration of novel ideas and technologies. Yet, it has not been studied quantitatively how national institutional contexts either facilitate or stifle organizational support for exploration. Available qualitative evidence suggests that institutional contexts that exert weak control over universities and research organizations strengthen their capabilities to achieve scientific breakthroughs, while contexts with strong control constrain them. The paper is based on an analysis of the population of Nobel laureates in Physics, Chemistry and Physiology or Medicine. We examine to what extent existing qualitative findings for the biomedical sciences, which are partly based on Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine, can be substantiated both quantitatively and across the three Nobel Prize fields of science. We find that for most of the 20th century and the early 21st century, countries with weak institutional control (United Kingdom, United States) have outperformed those exerting strong control (France, Germany). These results are further corroborated when controlled by population sizes and by GDP per capita. In addition, these results hold not only for the biomedical sciences, but also for Physics and Chemistry. Furthermore, countries with weak institutional control have attracted many future Nobel laureates from countries with strong environments. In this regard, the United States appears to be a particularly attractive setting for conducting innovative research, and thus has been a magnet for young and promising scientists. However, future laureates working in institutional environments exerting weak control are not faster in accomplishing their prize-winning work compared to those laureates working in more restrictive institutional settings.

Nobel Lecture: 51 Pegasi b and the exoplanet revolution

The 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by James Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz. These papers are the text of the address given in conjunction with the award.

Nobel Lecture: Plurality of worlds in the cosmos: A dream of antiquity, a modern reality of astrophysics

The 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by James Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz. These papers are the text of the address given in conjunction with the award.

Nobel Lecture: How physical cosmology grew

Received 4 February 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.92.030501© 2020 Nobel Foundation, Published by the American Physical Society*The 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by James Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz. This paper is the text of the address given in conjunction with the award.Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasCosmic microwave backgroundCosmological parametersCosmologyEvolution of the UniverseProfessional TopicsHistory of physicsGravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: How Star Scientists Influence their Co-Authors

Despite prior research that supports the link between collaborations with star scientists and their co-workers’ productivity, empirical findings on this relationship are surprisingly mixed. To address this, we theorize and empirically disentangle two mechanisms through which star peer effects can occur: a collaboration can convey a direct peer effect by acting as a pipe, through which ideas and knowledge are conveyed from a star to her co-workers, or an indirect peer effect by acting as a prism, meaning that a collaboration with a star signals the quality of her collaborators’ work to others. To investigate this, we examine the effect of collaborating on scientific publications with a star who either won, or was nominated for but did not win, the Nobel Prize in Physics. We use the death of a star to isolate pipes and do not find that the co-authors of Nobel Prize winners publish fewer articles than the co-authors of Nobel Prize nominees. Isolating prisms, we find that the articles of the co-authors of Nobel Prize winners that were published prior to the focal co-author’s first collaboration with the winner receive a citation boost after the Nobel Prize is awarded, relative to the co- authors of Nobel Prize nominees. Using an innovative measure of the recognition of pioneering research, we find that this difference in citations causes articles written by the co-authors of Nobel Prize nominees to experience a delay in recognition. Our results clarify how stars contribute to their co-workers’ productivity and provide evidence of the benefits that can arise from indirect peer effects.

Work honored by Nobel prizes clusters heavily in a few scientific fields.

We aimed to assess whether Nobel prizes (widely considered the most prestigious award in science) are clustering in work done in a few specific disciplines. We mapped the key Nobel prize-related publication of each laureate awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry (1995–2017). These key papers mapped in only narrow sub-regions of a 91,726-cluster map of science created from 63 million Scopus-indexed published items. For each key Nobel paper, a median of 435 (range 0 to 88383) other Scopus-indexed items were published within one year and were more heavily cited than the Nobel paper. Of the 114 high-level domains that science can be divided into, only 36 have had a Nobel prize. Five of the 114 domains (particle physics [14%], cell biology [12.1%], atomic physics [10.9%], neuroscience [10.1%], molecular chemistry [5.3%]) have the lion’s share, accounting in total for 52.4% of the Nobel prizes. Using a more granular classification with 849 sub-domains shows that only 71 of these sub-domains (8.3%) have at least one Nobel-related paper. Similar clustering was seen when we mapped all the 40,819 Scopus-indexed publications representing the career-long output of all the Nobel laureates. In conclusion, work resulting in Nobel prizes is concentrated in a small minority of scientific disciplines.

Spontaneous Symmetry-Breaking in the Corrosion Transformation of Ancient Bronzes

In general, during long-term museum conservation, ancient bronzes will generate new corrosion products also called the “secondary corrosion” on the surface of the unearthed “primary corrosion” products due to various environmental conditions. In this paper, the corrosion stages of several ancient Chinese bronzes are characterized by using optical microscope (OM), scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman spectrometer (Raman). It is found that there exist phase transformation relationships in between the “primary corrosion” and the “secondary corrosion” stages (i.e., (1) the crystal lattice type tends to transform from a high symmetry system to a low symmetry system; (2) in case of the same crystal lattice type, the corrosions exhibit an inter-transformation or symbiosis). It is interesting to note that these transformation rules are very consistent with the well-known physical law of “spontaneous symmetry-breaking”, which won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics and also has been considered to be general law of nature, in addition to the principle of Gibbs free energy reduction. The significance of this discovery allows us to achieve the predictability and controllability of the bronze corrosion products (i.e., to predict the corrosive trends in advance and control the “second corrosion” by adjusting the conservation conditions. This research provides a novel conservation concept of ancient bronzes.

Tests of Gravitational Theories with Observations of the Galactic Center and the Center of the Galaxy M87

In October 2019, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos.” In particular, one half of the prize was awarded to James Peebles “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology”; the other half of the prize was shared between Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star.” In fact, this also means recognition of the importance of work in the field of gravity, astrophysics, and cosmology. The use of astronomical observations of the Galactic Center to obtain constraints on the gravitational field near a supermassive black hole is discussed.

The chronicles of coronaviruses: the electron microscope, the doughnut, and the spike

The advancement of medicine owes in large measure to a German engineer Ernst Ruska, whose invention of transmission electron microscope in 1931 won him the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics, when it comes to infectious diseases. Encouraged by his physician brother Helmut Ruska to use the prototype instrument for the study of viruses, the course of virology was shifted to a different and unprecedented level. Virus could then be seen, identified and imaged. The University of Maryland happened to acquire an American model of transmission EM, the RCA EMU, using which the first structural study was done for the first known coronavirus (then was simply known as infectious bronchitis virus) in 1948. The virus was described as rounded bodies with filamentous projections. The magnification was not great and the resolution was poor. The study was followed by a series of studies using improved techniques and better EM spanning the next decade. An upgraded version RCA-EMU2A gave better images in 1957 and the virus was described as doughnut-like structure. Using Siemens Elmiskop, D.M. Berry and collaborators made the first high-resolution pictures in 1964. The thick envelope which gave doughnut-like appearance and filamentous projections reported before could be discerned as discrete pear-shaped projections called the spikes. These spikes form a corona-like halo around the virus, which were also seen in novel human viruses (B814 and 229E) that caused common colds. The discoverer of B814, David Tyrrell and his aid June Almeida, a magnificent electron microscopist, established that IBV, B814 and 229E were of the same kind of virus in 1967, which prompted to create the name coronavirus in 1968. This article further highlights the detail structural organisation of coronaviruses emanating from these pioneering research.

Research and derivation for Wien’s displacement law by using catastrophe theory

In this paper, Wien’s displacement law as one of the most important laws of thermal radiation, for which Wien has won the Nobel Prize in Physics, is studied and derived from the perspective of phase transition by using catastrophe theory. This paper describes in detail how the control variable causes the phase transition of the system potential function and the main indexes for judging whether the phase transition occurs. By extending the control variable in the catastrophe theory affecting the thermal radiation into multi-parameters form, the function equilibrium curve of the blackbody radiation is solved, and then the two expressions of Wien’s displacement law including wavelength-temperature and wavelength-temperature are derived theoretically. Furthermore, a phase transition method is proposed to study the thermal radiation of blackbody. This not only provides a new perspective for the research of thermal radiation, but also provides a new idea for the study of other phase transitions.

Experimental realization of Lieb-Mattis plateau in a quantum spin chain

Topological properties in material science have recently received tremendous attention, as exemplified by topological insulators. As for quantum spin systems, the Haldane chain with integer spins is the best known example1. The realization of a topological quantum phase in the Haldane chain is an innovative research development related to the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. For mixed spin chains composed of two different spins, the appearance of a topologically quantized magnetization plateau is predicted by the Lieb-Mattis theorem2 in combination with the Oshikawa-Yamanaka-Affleck criterion3. However, the actual magnetization plateau in the mixed spin chain has not yet been observed. Here, we present a model compound forming a mixed spin-(1/2, 5/2) chain. We observe a clear Lieb-Mattis plateau and well explain it quantitatively. The present results demonstrate a quantum many-body effect based on quantum topology and provide a new stage in the search for topological properties in condensed matter physics.

Application of Phase- Contrast Microscope for Detection of Prototheca spp. Microalgae in Tissue Section-First record.

Phase -contrast microscope was discovered in 1932 by the scientist Frits Zernike who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1953 for this scientific discovery. This technique is based on the fact that different parts of living cells have different densities and reflect the light with varying degrees and give different refractive parameters of the light. We used these phenomena to detect Prototheca spp. microalgae which are plant in origin and the wall contains sporopollenin which is biopolymers in nature and not found in animal tissue and this material is not in harmony with the contents of different animal cells. Therefore, it is possible to exploit this scientific phenomenon as a new method for the first time to identify Prototheca spp. microalgae in infected tissues.It has been possible to identify the infected tissue with Prototheca spp. microalgae with phase-contrast microscope as a simple rapid techniques, easy used for unstained slide. Also this technique may help the pathologist to study the life cycle and pathogenesis of this group of pathogen with the other specific standard methods for examination.

Schrodinger Wave Equation

The father of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger, was one of the most important figures in the development of quantum theory. He is perhaps best known for his contribution of the wave equation, which would later result in his winning of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933. The Schrodinger wave equation describes the quantum mechanical behaviour of particles and explores how the Schrodinger wave functions of a system change over time. This project is concerned about exploring the one-dimensional case of the Schrodinger wave equation in a harmonic oscillator system. We will give the solutions, called eigenfunctions, of the equation that satisfy certain conditions. Furthermore, we will show that this happens only for particular values called eigenvalues.

Interdisciplinary Research of Physics in Biological Field Leads the Nobel Prize 2018

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 was awarded jointly to Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland for giving new beam of light in the field of laser physics. Unravelling new mechanical properties of biological molecule has made an interdisciplinary approach with physics creating significant insight into solving devil diseases.

In Praise of a Great Contrarian

Always a perfect gentleman, Freeman Dyson nevertheless possessed a twinkle in his eye and a wry smile even as he invariably disagreed with whatever you had to say. Dyson, a Nobel laureate in physics, died on February 28, 2020, at the age of ninety-six. In this tribute, Lawrence Krauss recounts his friendship with Dyson and celebrates his life, achievements, and influence in physics.