Nature’s intrepid reporter Geoff Brumfiel (pictured right) has been hard at work in Pittsburgh at the American Physical Society’s March Meeting.
Here are some highlights.
It’s not really the sort of thing that you’d expect to find at a meeting which is mainly about materials, but I heard an interesting talk about recreating black hole jets in the laboratory today. For those unfamiliar with what I‘m talking about, swirling material around the top of a black hole often gets ejected in a long narrow stream. The process is complex and guided largely by the behavior of the hot, ionized gas in the jet, known as plasma.
Not many of the rules of physics are actually set in stone, but the diffraction limit is one of them. In imaging terms, the limit determines the smallest discernable feature you can make out through a microscope. It’s etched on this memorial to the 19th century German physicist Ernst Abbe, located in Jena (right). But as the Bible proves, rules set in stone are made for breaking…
Pretty much anything with iron pnictides in the title is guaranteed to draw a crowd at this year’s meeting.
You can read all about his adventures over on Nature’s In the Field blog, where you can also find out what this diagram is all about:
