Category Archives: Physics

Astronomy, General, Physics

Is the UK ready for a massive solar storm?

Leave a comment

A report published on the 07 February 2013 by the Royal Academy of Engineering examines this question.

 

sun
Image courtesy of NASA

UK must plan now to defend itself against extreme solar weather events

The UK should plan now to mitigate the effects of a rare but potentially serious solar superstorm, according to a report published today by the Royal Academy of Engineering. Although the UK is better prepared than many countries, there are areas where we need to improve our resilience.

http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/releases/shownews.htm?NewsID=825

The report Extreme space weather: impacts on engineered systems and infrastructure, was drawn up with the help of a diverse range of experts. This is the first report of its kind.

Areas highlighted

  • Electricity grid: six super grid transformers in England and Wales and a further seven grid transformers in Scotland could be damaged in the worse case scenario. The time to repair would be between weeks and months. However, local disruption is only expected to be hours as nodes have more than one transformer available.
  • Satellites: up to 10% of satellites could experience temporary outages lasting hours to days as a result of an extreme solar event.
  • Aircraft passenger and crew safety: increased cancer risk of 1 in 1,000 for each person exposed, although this must be considered in the context of the lifetime risk of cancer, which is about 30%.
  • Ground and avionic device technology: the estimate is that during a solar superstorm the avionic risk will be ~1,200 times higher than the quiescent background risk level and this could increase pilot workload.
  • Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS): a solar superstorm might render GNSS partially or completely inoperable for between one and three days.
  • Cellular and emergency communications: the UK’s commercial cellular communications networks are much more resilient to the effects of a solar superstorm than those deployed in a number of other countries since they are not reliant on GNSS timing. The emergency communications network is dependent on GNSS and mitigation strategies are already in place.
  • High frequency (HF) communications: HF communications is likely to be rendered inoperable for several days during a solar superstorm.
  • Mobile satellite communications: L-band (~1.5GHz) satellite
    communications might be unavailable, or provide a poor quality
    of service, for between one and three days.
  • Terrestrial broadcasting: vulnerable to secondary effects,
    such as loss of power and GNSS timing.

The take home message

Our message is: Don’t panic, but do prepare – a solar superstorm will happen one day and we need to be ready for it. Many steps have already been taken to minimise the impact of solar superstorms on current technology and by following the recommendations in the report we anticipate that the UK can further minimise the impact.

Professor Paul Cannon FREng, Chair of the Academy’s working group on extreme solar weather

Links
UK must plan now to defend itself against extreme solar weather events

Extreme space weather: impacts on engineered systems and infrastructure (opens pdf)

General, Physics

The Higgs Prize

Leave a comment

An annual prize, named after Professor Peter Higgs, has been launched by Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond.

The prize offers outstanding young physicists the chance to win a trip to CERN and see the cutting-edge of international physics.

 higgs
Mathematisches Institut Oberwolfach (MFO)

We’re delighted that the Government intends to introduce this prize. With £8.5 billion of the Scottish economy created by physics-based businesses, the prize is recognition of the vital importance of the subject.

Professor Sir Peter Knight, President of IOP

Link
Higgs Prize to recognise outstanding young physicists in Scotland IOP News

General Mathematics, Physics, Research work

The Myth of Academic Excellence?

1 Comment

Walter F.Wreszinski has written a short article called “The Myth of Academic Excellence and Scientific Curiosity” in the January 2013 edition of the News Bulletin of the International Association of Mathematical Physics [Wre]. It makes for some thought provoking reading…

The journals which we will call top A, of high “impact factor” (a rather controversial number analysed in detail in [Bin]), boast of high rejection indices, which reach 95 per cent, encouraging referees to recommend refusal in the almost totality of cases in order to justify this so important “measure of quality.” Thus, a major objective of these journals became the search for justifications to substantiate refusal, resulting in a one sided, and therefore unfair and unrealistic, view of the refereeing process.

Another interesting sentiment is quoted below.

We see that the main obstacle to the truth becoming known was the false concept of excellence associated to peer-review in top-A journals. A rejection to publish there leads to publication in a “non top A,” but this is equivalent to impart a label: the author did not succeed in publishing in top A, therefore the contribution is not first rate.

About Walter F.Wreszinski
Walter F.Wreszinski is a native of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and obtained his Ph.D. in 1973 at the Seminar für Theoretische Physik der ETH, Zürich, in the field of mathematical physics, having Prof. Dr. K. Hepp as thesis advisor. Since 1990 he has been full professor at the Departamento de Física Matemática, Instituto de Física, USP (University of São Paulo). His main research interests are mathematical statistical mechanics and quantum field theory.

Reference
[Bin] Mathias Binswanger, Sinnlose Wettbewerbe. Herder, 2010.

[Wre] Walter F.Wreszinski, The Myth of Academic Excellence and Scientic Curiosity, IAMP News Bulletin, January 2013 (pdf)

___________________________________________________

Note added 06/02/2013: Wreszinski’s article also appeared in the Brazilian Journal of Physics December 2012

Physics, Research work

Report on "From classical to quantum GR: applications to black holes" part II

Leave a comment

COST

I attended the winter school “From classical to quantum GR: applications to black holes” at the University of Sussex. The school was for three days over the 16th, 17th and 18th of January 2013. I posted a little about the event here.

The slides of the lectures are now available here.

The group photo

photo

A larger version of this photo can be found here

Once again I thank Xavier Calmet for organising the winter school, which turned out to be very wintery indeed.

Links
COST action black holes in a violent universe MP0905

Theoretical Particle Physics group at Sussex

Dr Xavier Calmet homepage

Winter school 2013 at Sussex

Education, General, Physics

How quantum physics democratised music, a lecture by lecture by Professor Sir Michael Berry

Leave a comment

How quantum physics democratised music

Date: Monday 4th March 2013
Venue: Institute of Physics, 76 Portland Place, London, W1B 1NT
Time: 18.30 (registration from 18.00)

sir berry
Professor Sir Michael Berry

“Connections between physics, technological invention, and aspects of human life that seem far from science, are both unexpected and unexpectedly common. And rather than flowing one way – from physics to gadgets – the connections form an intricate and subtle web, linking all aspects of human culture in a way that eludes our convenient intellectual categories.”

The lecture is free to attend and is open to all, physicists and non-physicists alike. You need to register at http://publiclectures2013.iop.org

The poster for the lecture can be found here (opens a PDF).

Note
The original message is from
Angela Townsend
Development Administration & HE Curriculum Support
Institute of Physics

Physics

Optical tractor beams can sort small particles

Leave a comment

Physicists in the Czech Republic have produced a simple example of an optical tractor beam using two laser beams [1]. Interestingly, they have also discovered a new technique for sorting microscopic particles.

abduction
We are not at the stage of lifting cows quite yet!

I posted a little about tractor beams before here, which employ a Bessel beam. Prof David Grier at New York University, published a paper last year announcing that they have experimentally demonstrated such a class of tractor beams [2].

What is new?
The work of the physicists at the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic shows that a simpler version of a tractor beam is possible. Their tractor beam comprises of two laser beams brought to a focus with a lens, which can easily be done using a standard commercial microscope system. They found that by focusing the light inwards they could generate the same effect as if they had employed a Bessel beam.

We are not the first to demonstrate experimentally the motion of particles in a beam where the intensity is homogeneous, but our method is a little bit simpler and more straightforward than previous efforts.

Pavel Zemánek

Particle sorting
An unexpected effect is that the particles are pushed or pulled by the laser light depending on both the size of the particles and the polarization of the light. This allowed the researchers to separate mixtures of two different sized particles by changing the polarisation of the light.

The fact that the effect of the polarisation of lights is so prominent is surprising and for sure will lead to further research.

scotty
Scotty would be proud … (Image courtesy of http://en.memory-alpha.org)

Link
Optical tractor beam sorts tiny particles (Physics World)(Jan 24, 2013)

Reference
[1] O. Brzobohatý, V. Karásek, M. Šiler, L. Chvátal, T. Čižmár & P. Zemánek, Experimental demonstration of optical transport, sorting and self-arrangement using a ‘tractor beam’, Nature Photonics (2013) doi:10.1038/nphoton.2012.332 (Link)

[2] Optical conveyors: A class of active tractor beams, D. B. Ruffner and D. G. Grier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 163903 (2012) [5 pages]

Education, Physics

IOP response to House of Lords Science and Technology Committee for inquiry topic recommendations

Leave a comment

There is growing concern about the impact that reduced funding and support for postgraduate education, especially taught Masters Programmes, will have for the UK’s science and innovation base in terms of producing highly trained people that will have the skills and knowledge requisite for academic research and to meet the demanding needs of industry. We essentially have a system in place that is transferring the costs of postgraduate education to UK students which will have implications for the participation levels of UK-domiciled students.


Request for inquiry topic recommendations (18 January 2013)

Physics, Research work

Report on "From classical to quantum GR: applications to black holes"

Leave a comment

COST

I attended the winter school “From classical to quantum GR: applications to black holes” at the University of Sussex. The school was for three days over the 16th, 17th and 18th of January 2013.

The school was organised within the COST action black holes in a violent universe MP0905. You can find out more about the action here. The local organiser was Dr Xavier Calmet, who did a good job.

The school covered a mixture of theoretical physics, phenomenology and observational astronomy. The program consisted of reviews of general relativity, quantum gravity, astroparticle physics and black hole physics. The main emphasis of the lectures was on how to probe new gravitational effects using colliders and astrophysical observations.

Black hole
Image courtesy of NASA (concept drawing)

Due to the wide range of speakers, the level and tone of the lectures was kept informal. Indeed, a large proportion of the audience were PhD and masters students. from my point of view the level of the lectures was right, black hole physics is not my area of expertise.

Overall I enjoyed the school and the friendly atmosphere at Sussex.

The lectures
The lectures were for 3 hours, broken up into two parts. That sounds quite monstrous, but the pedagogical nature of the talks tempered this. The quality of the lectures was very high.

The speakers were

  • David Champion (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie)
  • Panagiota Kanti (University of Ioannina)
  • Claus Kiefer (Universitaet zu Koeln)
  • Iossif Papadakis (University of Crete)
  • Eram Rizvi (Queen Mary, University of London)
  • Elizabeth Winstanley (University of Sheffield)

A timetable of the lectures can be found here.

I believe slides will be available at some point. I will link to them in due course.

black hole
Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Snow
Heavy snow fell on the Friday, so the winter school really did feel like a winter school!

Funding

The main source of funding was the COST action. You can find out more about COST here.

Further financial support was given by the Institute of Physics and in particular from its High Energy Particle Physics group and Mathematical and Theoretical Physics Group.

COST
COST, “European Cooperation in Science and Technology”, is an intergovernmental framework for European Cooperation in Science and Technology, allowing the coordination of nationally-funded research on a European level.

Find out more here.

Links
COST action black holes in a violent universe MP0905

Theoretical Particle Physics group at Sussex

IOP High Energy Particle Physics Group

IOP Mathematical and Theoretical Physics Group