PRL Celebrates 50 Years

Coming Soon in Physics

Clean graphene
Inside a supersolid

Now in Focus

Antimatter Bounces Off Matter

August 11, 2008

A large fraction of an antimatter beam can reflect off of a wall made of normal matter instead of annihilating. The surprising effect turns out to follow from standard, textbook physics.

Editors' Suggestions

Papers the editors and referees find of particular interest, importance, or clarity.

Physical Review Letters
Physical Review B

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Viewpoints

Dancing the Bose-nova with a twirl

By Maciej Lewenstein, August 18, 2008A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) can dramatically collapse and explode when the interactions between the atoms are sufficiently strong and attractive. Now, scientists have imaged the anisotropic, clover-leaf shape of such a collapsing gas when the attractive atomic interactions are strongly dipolar. Read More »

The end of the world at the Large Hadron Collider?

By Michael E. Peskin, August 18, 2008New arguments based on astrophysical phenomena constrain the possibility that dangerous black holes will be produced at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Read More »

Searching high and low for bottomonium

By Stephen Godfrey, August 11, 2008The BABAR collaboration at SLAC has observed the radiative decay of an excited state of bottomonium (the bound state of a bottom quark and its antiparticle) to its ground state η_b. Observing this long-sought ground state should enable better tests of quantum chromodynamic calculations of quark interactions and the computational approach called lattice quantum chromodynamics. Read More »

How stable are the heaviest nuclei?

By Joseph B. Natowitz, August 11, 2008Heavy nuclei formed by fusion reactions often decay rapidly by fissioning into two fragments. Understanding how these decays occur and over what time scale provides a means to locate the superheavy “island of stability.” Read More »

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Trends

Ultracold neutral plasmas

By Steven L. Rolston, July 14, 2008Laser-cooled atomic vapors can be photoionized to form plasmas at temperatures as low as 1 K. This may allow the study of very unusual neutral plasmas with liquid and even crystalline properties. Read More »

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From the Editor

Introducing Physics

Anyone who has recently glanced at a library shelf of physics journals or browsed the literature online will instantly recognize both the increase in volume and the fragmentation of disciplines. How can a researcher stay on top of his or her own field, much less stay abreast of related areas that might harbor interdisciplinary gems? To address this, we begin a new publication, simply called Physics. Read More »

Synopses

Slowing light with plasmonic molecules

August 18, 2008 [Synopsis on Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 047401 (2008)]

Optics Nanophysics

The response of nanostructured metal strips to an electromagnetic field may turn out to be similar to that of atomic gases. Periodic arrays of these artificial metal “molecules” could in principle form a metamaterial that slows light pulses and is easily integrated into optical circuits. Read More »

Weighty matters

August 18, 2008 [Synopsis on Phys. Rev. C 78, 021303 (2008)]

Nuclear Physics

The long-held belief that nuclear states of very heavy elements that carry a large angular momentum would be unstable has been shattered in recent years. Now, a new experiment that can probe the outermost nuclear orbitals in ²⁵⁰Fm studies these states and poses a challenge to theory. Read More »

What is obvious may not be trivial

August 18, 2008 [Synopsis on Phys. Rev. B 78, 075302 (2008)]

Mesoscopics

Researchers find that tunneling between the two layers of a bilayer two-dimensional electron gas is proportional to their area. Although the result may seem intuitive it poses a challenge to current theory. Read More »

Doing sums with swirls

August 11, 2008 [Synopsis on Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 064301 (2008)]

Nonlinear Dynamics Interdisciplinary Physics

Acoustic vortices that interact in a nonlinear medium may be one route to a new kind of robust arithmetic computation. Read More »

The pressure is on to ban doping

August 11, 2008 [Synopsis on Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 057006 (2008)]

Superconductivity

The ability to tune the onset of superconductivity in a single crystal with other means than chemical doping makes the interpretation of results much cleaner. Now, scientists demonstrate pressure-induced superconductivity in undoped crystals of the pnictide CaFe₂As₂. Read More »

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