Operations

Every working day some $150 billion flows through Australia’s Interbank system.

Postgraduate student Andrey Sokolov from the University of Melbourne, together with colleagues from Melbourne and Swinburne universities, is analysing the flow of that money to study the dynamics of the overnight loan flows and the stability of the network.

The team is developing dynamic models that test whether the daily flow of funds between Australia’s banks is as robust as it seems – and what might cause its collapse.

Following this money trail as it grows and evolves should help financial regulators to protect our banks better.

[Read more…] about The physics of money – testing the stability of the system

Alessandro Tuniz and colleagues at the University of Sydney have designed a fibre that would be invisible over a range of colours. And because of recent developments in ways to draw hybrid materials into fibres, their proposal may be relatively straightforward to put into practice.

Such fibres could lead to interesting effects in art, architecture and fashion. They are also being studied in the broader context of building cheap, next-generation devices with special optical properties, such as fibre-based super-lensing which improves the resolution limit of microscopes.  And the fibres could also provide support for optical elements but without optical distortion.

[Read more…] about Invisible fibres disappearing soon

By James Mitchell Crow

Recurring prostate cancers can be subdued with a blast of laser light, say Swedish researchers who presented their latest research at the Australian Institute of Physics conference in Melbourne.

Katarina Svanberg and colleagues at Lund University Hospital use lasers to build 3D maps of the tumours, and then to kill the cancerous cells in them.

She reported early success in managing what is usually a fatal condition. More work remains to be done, however, before the technique is used routinely in hospitals. [Read more…] about Light rays treat tumours

By James Mitchell Crow

UK physicists have developed new ways of generating industrial lasers powerful enough to slice through steel. The trick is to pass the beam along active optical fibres, David Payne from the University of Southampton told the Australian Institute of Physics conference in Melbourne. And 50 years after the first demonstration of a laser, the intense beams that can be generated in this way are so powerful they can be used to cut out car parts and weld them together. [Read more…] about Laser beams on steroids

By James Michell Crow

An international team of researchers based in Colorado has captured the movements of single electrons in a chemical bond, using ultra-short x-ray pulses. The technique, which allows them to follow the movement of electrons across solar cells and other materials, was presented at the Australian Institute of Physics conference in Melbourne. [Read more…] about Watching electrons in action

By Vivien Lee

The danger of sunburn for construction workers is just as high in autumn and winter as in spring and summer, a researcher told the Australian Institute of Physics Congress in Melbourne.

Just as skiers need to be careful of UV rays reflected off snow, she said, construction workers run the risk of exposure from light reflected by metals on the building site. And in winter they’re less likely to be wearing sunscreen. [Read more…] about Sun sneaks up on winter workers

By Vivien Lee

It took less than 19 days of smashing lead ions together at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland for physicists confirm a new state of matter, the Australian Institute of Physics Congress was told in Melbourne. What the huge particle detector attached to the collider, known as the ATLAS experiment, has found is the first direct evidence of the Quark-Gluon Plasma—a 200 million degree Celsius soup of subatomic particles.

“It’s the very definition of primordial,” said Dr Martin White, a postdoctoral fellow from the University of Melbourne who is working on the project. [Read more…] about First results from the ATLAS experiment

Kumar Ganesan and colleagues from University of Melbourne think they may have found the perfect material from which to build bionic eyes—diamond. They are using the ultra-strong, biocompatible material to build the electrodes needed to pass light signals to the optic nerve. And they are already testing their devices.

In fact, diamond seems so well suited to life inside the eye that the team also plan to seal the bionic eye’s light-sensing chip inside a diamond box, which should protect its contents for a projected 80 years.

[Read more…] about Is that a diamond in your eye?