Top 10 breakthroughs of
year 2012
- CERN
discovers Higgs-like boson: The
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
maser: A 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.