Issues

It took a sophisticated instrument—the human ear—to alert Berkeley researchers that the quantum oscillations they sought were indeed coming from their container of superfluid helium‐3. Their experiment is a dramatic demonstration of the AC Josephson effect in superfluids.

Quantum computers have been shown to provide a dramatic speedup over classical computers in solving problems by exhaustive searching. For example, the widely used 56‐bit Data Encryption Standard could be cracked with a mere 200 million or so computations instead of about 35 quadrillion.

By exploiting a nonequilibrium reaction, Harvard chemists have found they can readily produce a high yield of unsaturated hydrocarbons starting with a hydrocarbon that is normally rather unreactive.

J. J. Thomson “discovered” the electron a hundred years ago. Eventually, the accumulating experimental and theoretical evidence made it clear to all but the most obdurate skeptics that there really are electrons.

Puzzles and mysteries abound: Are there more than just the six leptons already known; what is the intrinsic difference between the electron, the muon and the tau; do neutrinos have mass?

In condensed matter physics, some particles behave like fragments of an electron.

How silicon MOSFET technology came to dominate the ways in which electrons are used in logic and memory devices; will this dominance continue?

Reaching to smaller and smaller scales, modern electron beams are used for studying atomic arrangements inside solids and for imprinting tiny patterns on semiconductor chips.