I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this lot is a bunch of articles about new developments in the study of solid state systems:
- "Are Doubly Charged Particles Lurking in High-T Superconductors?": I don't know. Are they? Exactly what mechanism leads to electron pairing and superconductivity in the high-temperature ceramic superconductors remains a mystery, and this reports on a new suggestion that it's the result of a new particle that "would be distinct from a Cooper pair, the charge carrier in a superconductor. The new particle would be a boson that carries twice the charge of an electron, but is not made out of elementary excitations." I'm not entirely sure what that means, which is why I haven't posted about it before.
- "Supersolid saga continues": Seriously, guys, this is starting to get old.
- The hot system of the moment in solid state systems seems to be "graphene," which is basically a single-atom sheet of graphite-- a single sheet of carbon atoms in a planar arrangement. There have been a zillion graphene stories in the last few months, of which I flagged two: "Graphene p-n junction unveiled" and "Graphene oxide weaved into 'paper'". They're pretty much what they sound like from the titles.
So is it correct that you have to be a member of the "Institute of Physics" to read these physicsworld.com articles?