Physics in Pictures by Topic
Atomic
Steady Drip of Progress
It flows in rivulets, puddles in depressions, falls from the sky; you can even buy it at Costco--three-dimensional, "bulk" water is everywhere.
Speed Trap
Like traffic cops with radar guns, physicists can now gauge the speed of electrons in a current.
Smashing Ions
Brookhaven National Laboratory's new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) smashes two high-energy beams of gold nuclei together head-on, in an attempt to create a state of matter, called quark-gluon plasma, that last existed only ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang.
Crystal Clear
When an all-electron Wigner crystal (top) is squeezed too tightly, the electron wave functions begin to overlap (middle), and then create a quantum liquid (bottom).
A New Twist
The frictionless flow of atoms within solid helium may be confined to the axis of a screw dislocation, a spiral defect like the one in this crystal of silicon carbide.
Molecular Motion
The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) can make impressive images of single atoms and molecules on surfaces; now it has been used to measure a molecule's internal motion.
The World's Largest Cyclotron
If you are asked how a watch works, one of the first things you might do is open one up and look at the parts inside.
Trilobite Molecules
Researchers have recently predicted the existence of a giant two-atom rubidium molecule with an electron cloud resembling a trilobite, the ancient, hard-shelled creature which lived in the Earth's seas over 300 million years ago.
Veins of Gold
Researchers dream of building crystals from the ground up to achieve tight control of their periodic structure.
Cold Molecules
Physicists have cooled single atoms and molecules with two or three atoms to just a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, but it has proved hard to push larger molecules below about 10 degrees Kelvin.
Cold Atoms
This year's physics Nobel Prize went to three researchers who were the first to observe and study the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a new phase of matter.
The Circle Game
Like a planet orbiting the sun, some ideas keep coming around. In the 1920s, the inventors of quantum mechanics scuttled the notion that an atom behaves like a tiny solar system.
Catch a Quasiperiodic Wave
Quasicrystals are unusual metallic alloys whose atoms are arranged in orderly patterns that are not quite crystalline.