It's more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling "Year's Best" lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I'll throw this open to my readers before compiling my own highly biased list.
So, a call for nominations:
In your opinion, what is the most important, influential, or exciting development in physics in 2006?
This could be a new experimental measurement, or it could be an exciting new theoretical development. There will be a separate post for nominating the astronomy result of the year, so try to restrict this to physics. Post your nomination (or nominations-- I'm not going to limit the number of submissions) in the comments, ideally with some sort of citation (refereed journal articles would be best, though I'll take ArXiV links or popular-press stories), and some short statement of why this is an important result.
I'll compile a list of nominations, and if we get enough good ones, I'll have a vote, like for the Top Eleven. If we don't get enough good nominations, I'll just post my own biased list.
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The most important physics result of the year, of course, is exactly the same as the most important astronomy result this year :)
(Hey, I've found many physicists who seem to think that cosmology is the only sort of astronomy that's really interesting, or even the only sort of astronomy that's really science. Then again, I have found lots of astronomers who don't think that cosmology is science at all....)
More seriously... dunno. I mean, I could point to the Nobel Prize, but that's also arguably astronomy, and it wasn't quite this year....
-Rob
Confirmation of the results of Kim and Chan on "super-solid Helium" with an accompanying increase in the mystery of the effect with the discovery that annealing seems to make the effect go away. References? Uh, see this article: http://iberkshires.com/story.php?story_id=21656
Or perhaps the new measurement done at Harvard of the electron magnetic moment and the fine structure constant, finally beating the measurement done in 1987 by a factor of six. Experiments probing 130 GeV done a milliK temperatures are always cool. Reference: http://hussle.harvard.edu/~gabrielse/gabrielse/papers/2006/NewElectronM…
The two mentioned by Dave were on my mind as soon as I read the original post. But thinking about it - those were perhaps the two most talked-about stories - not neccessarily most significant. Supersolid story gets only murkier - it's still far from being resolved. It's still quite possible (likely even) that the supersolidity effect is due to superfluid flow between grain boundaries or defects.
as to Gabrielse's fine structure constant refinement - I see it as mostly a technical achievement. A lot of hype, but just like if someone measured electron mass or planck constant with a better precision, it wouldn't influence the rest of science.
My picks include:
Kosterlitz-Thouless-Berezinski melting of 2D crystals in BEC (also superfluid state in BEC by Ketterle group at MIT)
High-T BEC's by French and German groups - in gas and solid state.
Spin Hall Effect by Awschalom at Santa Barbara and a separate study by Tinkham group at Harvard.
Etanglement of two qubits by Santa Barbara group.
Role of phonons in high-Tc superconductors by Davis group at Cornell.
"Harry-Potter-like" invisibility cloaks (I know, hype, but still)
geomagnetic "memory" of previous flips of magnetic Earth poles.
latest WMAP results on microwave radiation
three-body Efimov state by U Chicago group
Pseudogap in manganites by Shen's group at Stanford
Work on magnetic atoms manipulation and visualization by Yazdani group at Princeton
I'm embarassed to admit that I was reminded of this by a story on the front page of a newspaper, which was below a story that looked like no more than comparative advertising between two telecom companies, but:
What about the nanocrystal solid state lighting stuff from Sandy Rosenthal's group at Vanderbilt? Yeah, I know (a) I'm being provincial here, and (b) it's from a Chemistry department. But, some of what she's doing seems to be on that fine line between solid-state/nano physics and Chemistry, so it may be valid.
Here's her web page on the matter:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Chemistry/groups/rosenthal/Nanocrystal.ht…
Hmm... looking at it, it seems that the relevant publications were indeed in 2005, so this wouldn't qualify.
Still, potentially a big deal. However, it is probably more of a big deal from an engineering point of view ("replace the light bulb" is what all the news stories say) than from a physics point of view.
-Rob
There are also results, which I'm skeptical of, but which, if true, are a big deal. For instance evidence of the variation of the electron/proton mass ratio, by Reinhold et al would be a big deal. Reference: http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PR…
The work that Scott Diddams and the other folks have done at NIST on high-precision optical frequency standards is always amazing, and this year, they reported a comparison of their Hg+ clock standard to the Cs standard that demonstrated that their optical-to-microwave conversion process is signficantly better than the inherent precision of the clocks, which is extremely impressive. Given that the experiments are pretty far into hero country to begin with, their results are just extraordinary.
Also, the "optical cloaking" work in periodic structures may not have the sorts of near-term consequences that newspaper science writers would have us believe it does, but it's still a pretty damn cool result.
The use of negative index of refraction metamaterials to cloak objects is pretty cool. On my own blog, I nominate a rather technical debate (validity of the fourth-root trick for staggered fermions) for "Lattice QCD result of the year", but somehow I don't believe it will do much to capture the public imagination ... so the invisible copper wire it probably is. On the other hand, if the recently announced discovery of axions were to hold up, that would take the prize hands down.
how about the PVLAS experiment in italy measuring optical rotation in vacuum? that seemed pretty big.
What, no particle physics? CDF came out with a beautiful B_s mixing observation, hep-ex/0609040; that's my nomination. 2nd vote is for Gabrielse's new fine-structure constant.
Nobody seems to know what to make of PVLAS; it's huge if it's confirmed, but (like the completely-ruled-out DAMA dark-matter observation and the still-supportable-if-you-stretch LSND electron-neutrino appearance observation) we're waiting for the effect to be confirmed independently. Big, big news if it is.