PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 794 September 26, 2006 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and Davide Castelvecchi www.aip.org/pnu HYPERSOUND, ACOUSTIC PULSATION AT 200-GHz FREQUENCIES, has been produced in the same kind of resonant multilayered semiconductor cavity as used in photonics. Physicists at the Institute des Nanosciences de Paris (France) and the Centro Atomico Bariloche and Instituto Balseiro (Argentina) generate the high frequency sound pulses in a solid material made of thin GaAs and AlAs layers. One can picture the sound, excited by a femtosecond laser, as being a short pulse of waves or equivalently as particle-like phonons, excitations pulsing through the stack of layers. These phonons are reflected at either end of the device, called a nanocavity, by further layers with a much different acoustic impedance acting as mirrors. Acoustic impedance is the acoustic analog of the refractive index for light. Bernard Jusserand ([EMAIL PROTECTED], 33-1-4427-6980) says that he and his colleagues hope to reach the terahertz acoustic range. The wavelength for such sound is only nm in length. They believe that a new field, nanophononics, has been inaugurated, and that the acoustical properties of semiconductor nanodevices will become more prominent. THz phonons, and more specifically the reported nanocavities could, for example, be used to modulate the flow of charges or light at high frequency and in small spaces. THz sound might also participate in the development of powerful acoustic lasers or in novel forms of tomography for imaging the interior of opaque solids. (Huynh et al., Physical Review Letters, 15 September 2006)
ELLIPSOIDAL UNIVERSE. A new theoretical assessment of data taken by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) suggests that the universe---at least that part of it that can be observed---is not spherically symmetric, but more like an ellipsoid. The WMAP data has served to nail down some of the most important parameters in all of science, such as the age of the universe since the big bang (13.7 billion years), the time when the first atoms formed (380,000 years after the big bang), and the fractions of all available energy vested in the form of ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy. One remaining oddity about the WMAP results, however, concerns the way in which portions of the sky contribute to the overall map of cosmic microwaves; samples of the sky smaller than one degree across, or at the degree level, or tens of degrees seem to be contributing radiation at expected levels. Only the largest possible scale, that on the order of the whole sky itself (technical term: the quadrupole moment), seems to be under-represented. Now Leonardo Campanelli of the University of Ferrara and his colleagues Paolo Cea and Luigi Tedesco at the University of Bari (all in Italy) have studied what happens to the quadrupole anomaly if one supposes that the shell from which the cosmic microwaves come toward earth is an ellipsoid and not a sphere. This shell is called surface of last scattering since it corresponds to that moment in history when photons largely stopped scattering from charged particles when it became cool enough for many of the particles to bundle themselves into neutral atoms. If the microwave shell is an ellipsoid with an eccentricity (non-sphericity) of about 1 %, then the WMAP quadrupole is exactly what it should be. This is not the first time a non-spherical universe has been suggested, but it is the first time the idea has been applied to the state-of-the-art WMAP data. Historically an ellipsoidal universe would nicely parallel Johannes Keplers discovery that the planetary orbits were ellipses and not circles. This adjustment in astronomical thinking was just as revolutionary as Copernicus helio-centric model, and it helped Newton and others arrive at the idea of an inverse-square law for gravitational attraction. What could have caused the universe as a whole to be ellipsoidal? Campanelli ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), Cea and Tedesco say that a uniform magnetic field pervading the cosmos, or a defect in the fabric of spacetime, could bring about a nonzero eccentricity. (Campanelli, Cea, Tedesco, Physical Review Letters, 29 September 2006 ) *********** PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE is a digest of physics news items arising from physics meetings, physics journals, newspapers and magazines, and other news sources. It is provided free of charge as a way of broadly disseminating information about physics and physicists. For that reason, you are free to post it, if you like, where others can read it, providing only that you credit AIP. Physics News Update appears approximately once a week. AUTO-SUBSCRIPTION OR DELETION: By using the expression "subscribe physnews" in your e-mail message, you will have automatically added the address from which your message was sent to the distribution list for Physics News Update. If you use the "signoff physnews" expression in your e-mail message, the address in your message header will be deleted from the distribution list. Please send your message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Leave the "Subject:" line blank.)