Seeing stealth bombers and freeing mobile networks

Australian Institute of Physics, Australian Institute of Physics Congress, Media bulletins
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A West Australian invention that’s keeping atomic clocks accurate, searching for gravity waves, and improving radar systems has won its creators a national physics prize.

And, as mobile networks become increasingly congested, Sydney engineers have designed new technology that can be retrofitted into mobile communication systems to increase their capacity and reduce the cost of mobile calls.

Read on for more stories from the final day of the national physics congress in Sydney.

AIP/ACOFT 2012, the joint Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian Conference on Optical Fibre Technology, is at the University of New South Wales, Kensington.

Keeping atomic clocks accurate, seeing stealth bombers and more…

A West Australian invention that’s keeping atomic clocks accurate, searching for gravity waves, and improving radar systems has won its creators a national physics prize.

The tool generates the world’s most precisely timed microwave signals, and could potentially be used in radar systems to detect a stealth bomber. It may even help reveal quantum gravity. The work will be presented at the national physics congress in Sydney today.

The technology developed and patented by Professors Michael Tobar and Eugene Ivanov from the University of Western Australia allows the generation of signals at a level of resolution only limited by basic thermal or quantum fluctuations.

The pure signals produced by this technology have particular application in reducing the noise that limits the resolution of radars and have been commercialised by the West Australian high-tech company Poseidon Scientific Instruments for this purpose. Poseidon was recently acquired by the US technical giant Raytheon.

Such has been the industrial application of their research that Michael Tobar and Eugene Ivanov were last night awarded the Australian Institute of Physics Alan Walsh medal for service to industry.

Initially, this technology was developed from basic research to develop a precision gravitational wave detector. Also, a cryogenic version was developed, which is now a very important device for keeping atomic clocks accurate. Professors Tobar and Ivanov are still exploring future uses of this technology with funding from the Australian Research Council, which potentially could lead to the discovery of quantum gravity – and revolutionise theoretical physics.

In particular, within the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, they are now trying to detect quantum behaviour in fist-sized quantities of sapphire, at extremely cold temperatures. Finding quantum behaviour in such a large object, would make experiments on quantum gravity possible.

Michael Tobar is speaking about the work which has earned him and Eugene Ivanov the Alan Walsh Medal at 12.45pm today.

Freeing up space on the mobile network

As mobile networks become increasingly congested, Sydney engineers have designed new technology that can be retrofitted into mobile communication systems to increase their capacity and reduce the cost of mobile calls.

A new FM radio-over-fibre system developed by Professor Graham Town of Macquarie University and his co-workers should make the transition of signals between the wireless network and the optical fibre network, which increasingly forms the backbone of Australia’s communication systems, much more straightforward.

Typically a call from a mobile phone is transmitted wirelessly to a receiving tower, then transformed into light signals to travel over the optical fibre network, and back into wireless to reach the receiver. The new system would make the transitions from microwave to light and back much simpler. It requires no expensive electro-optical or microwave components, Town says.

Graham Town will be speaking about the new system in Room CLB 2 at 11.45 am in a paper entitled Simple frequency shift keyed radio-over-fibre communication system.

Could algae help us make better solar panels?

Algae get their food from the sun through photosynthesis – and Queensland researchers are trying to understand that process to make more efficient solar cells.

And they reckon that algae and other plants might even take advantage of the effects of quantum physics when transferring the energy of sunlight to make sugars during photosynthesis.

Until recently physicists assumed such quantum effects would be disrupted by heat and could only persist at very cold temperatures. Not so, Drew Ringsmuth, a PhD student at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, will tell Australia’s biennial physics conference in Sydney on Thursday.

He has been modelling the energy transfer systems of the photosynthetic proteins of algae, and with his colleagues has found that it may be possible to engineer materials inspired by such proteins, structured in such a way as to filter out the disruption.

The work may also contribute to the development of quantum computing.

Drew Ringsmuth will deliver a paper entitled Multi-scale structure and energetics in photosynthetic solar energy harvesting in Room CLB 3 at 3.30 pm today.

After Higgsteria, it’s down to business

The latest data on the Higgs-boson-like particle—announced with so much fanfare in Melbourne and Geneva in early July—suggests that it is not only the genuine particle, but one which fits the Standard Model, the simplest of the theories of particle physics.

That’s the message being delivered to Australia’s biennial physics conference this week in Sydney. Whereas little beyond the detection signature of the particle was clear in July, we now have double the data. And it suggests, among other things, that the new particle has a spin of zero, and decays to two photons and other particles including tau leptons.

Physicists will now be working for the next decade or so digging through more and more data to try to flesh out further details of the Higgs boson, more likely several types of Higgs boson

They will be exploring its connection with unifying the four fundamental physical forces of the Universe, and even with dark matter. This could involve particles so massive that world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility near Geneva, may not have enough energy to do the job.

You can hear more at 9.45 am on Thursday 13 December when Associate Professor Elisabetta Barberio from the University of Melbourne delivers a plenary session entitled Discovery of the Higgs Boson in Room CLB 7.

Or you can contact Associate Professor Csaba Balazs, the Director of the Monash node of the Centre for Particle Physics at the Terascale who gave a paper on Higgs discovery: Opening a new era of particle physics on Monday.

Ripple of excitement

A team of students from Gosford High School have won a national school physics competition for their experimental finding that the size of the ripples water makes when you turn on your tap are determined by more than simple pressure forces.

The four students received their $1,000 prize from Professor Brian Schmidt, Australia’s 2011 Nobel Laureate for Physics, and presented their winning project just before Brain Schmidt’s public lecture at the University of New South Wales last night at the 2012 Australian Institute of Physics Congress.

Key contact details for AIP/ACOFT 2012:

The media website is at http://www.scienceinpublic.com.au/category/physicscongress

The conference website is at http://www.aip2012.org.au

Media director:

Niall Byrne, +61 (417) 131-977, niall@scienceinpublic.com.au

Media contacts:

AJ Epstein, + 61 (433) 339 141, aj@scienceinpublic.com.au

Margie Beilharz, +61 (415) 448 065, margie@scienceinpublic.com.au