Tuesday 22 January 2013




Top 10 breakthroughs of year 2012

  •      CERN discovers Higgs-like bosonThe Higgs boson and its associated field explain how electroweak symmetry was broken just after the Big Bang to give certain elementary particles the property of mass.
  •   Spotting Majorana Fermions:  "Majorana fermions" are particles that are also their own antiparticles. Now, Leo Kouwenhoven and colleagues have spotted the first hints of Majorana fermions at the interface between a topological superconductor and a semiconductor.
  •  Time-reversal violation :Physicists have been waiting for almost 50 years for a direct observation of time-reversal (T) violation.  A first direct observation of time-reversal violation is made by measuring the rates at which the B0 meson changes quantum states."
  •  Galaxy-cluster motion : The motions of distant galaxy  lusters can tell us much about how the universe formed and also shed light on the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.  Now, Nick Hand and colleagues at ACT and BOSS have observed just that in another triumph of precision cosmology.
  •  Peering through opaque materials :Allard Mosk and colleagues have developed a new technique for seeing fluorescent objects behind opaque barriers. They have used a common effect called laser speckle to see micrometre-sized fluorescent objects through several millimetres of opaque material.
  •  Room-temperature maserA maser has been developed to operate a room temperature for the first time by Mark Oxborrow, Jonathan Breeze and Neil Alford,  .Masers are are extremely sensitive microwave detectors and could therefore be used in a wide range of telecommunications and imaging applications.
  • Wiping data will cost you energy : When an individual bit of data is erased, a tiny amount of heat is released and this has been        first measured by Antoine Bérut, Artak  rakelyan, Artyom Petrosyan and Sergio Ciliberto of Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Eric Lutz of the University of Augsburg and Raoul Dillenschneider of the University of Kaiserslautern.
  • Entangling twisted beams : Anton Zeilinger, Robert Fickler and colleagues at the University of Vienna have devised new technique for entangling photons using orbital angular momentum."
  •  Neutrino-based communication :    If you want to send a message across the universe – or to a submarine deep below the waves – then neutrinos could be your best bet. Your message would be guaranteed to get there because the subatomic particles can easily pass through 1000 light-years of lead without being affected. Physicists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and engineers from North Carolina State University and NASA Glenn Research Center led by Daniel Stancil from North Carolina State have demonstrated communications using neutrinos."
  •  Generating and storing energy in one step A new system has been created that converts kinetic energy into chemical energy in a single step has been created by Zhong Lin Wang and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology.