Jahn-Teller Metals: A New Form Of Matter?

Given its ability to become an insulator and a superconductor just by varying the applied pressure, are Jahn-Teller metals qualify as a new form of matter? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Back in May 12, 2015, researchers at Japan’s Tohoku University are making a bold claim saying that they had discovered an entirely new form of matter. The team led by Kosmas Prassides, says they’ve created what’s called a Jahn-Teller metal by inserting atoms of rubidium – a strange alkali metal more chemically reactive than pure metallic sodium – into buckyballs or buckminsterfullerene, a pure carbon structure which has a spherical shape formed from a series of interlocking polygons of carbon atoms. Buckyballs, which are somewhat related to other carbon supermaterials like graphene and carbon nanotubes, are already known for their superconductive capabilities. Here, while combining buckyballs and rubidium, the researchers created a complex crystalline structure that seemed to conduct, insulate and magnetize while acting as a metal. It goes beyond what ordinary matter can do. 

Jahn-Teller metals have recently created a buzz in the scientific community because such esoteric form of matter could serve as a key to understanding one of the biggest mysteries in physics that has baffled them since the late 1980s – i.e. the phenomenon of high-temperature superconductivity. Named after the Jahn-Teller Effect which is used in chemistry to describe how at low pressures the geometric arrangement of molecules and ions in an electronic state can become distorted. This new state of matter allows scientists to transform an insulator – which can’t conduct electricity – into a conductor by simply applying pressure. Could Jahn-Teller metals be used in constructing a new generation of piezoelectric materials for use in high fidelity audio someday? 

Element 113 Discovered At Last?

Long thought to be too unstable to be synthesized in our current atom smashers, is the recent announcement by the IUPAC serves as a true confirmation of the “creation” of Element 113? 

By: Ringo Bones

In January 4, 2016, officials from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) have announced the confirmation of the discovery of not only the elusive and unstable Element 113 but also its close siblings – elements 115, 117 and 118, stating that there is now enough evidence to give them permanent places on the Periodic Table of the Elements. Given that Element 113 is notoriously located in the unstable part of the Periodic Table that it is very likely that its half-life would probably be no more than a few microseconds and this also means that they also need their respective new, official names. 

By their very nature, you won’t find these four newly discovered elements occurring naturally in reasonable abundance because they can only be produced synthetically in our corner of the universe because their isotopes that we manage to synthesize so far decay in a matter of seconds or less. Their existence has been theorized but has been difficult to confirm. Until now, elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 had temporary names and positions on the bottom “Seventh Row” of the Periodic Table of the Elements because – probably since the 1980s – scientists have struggled to create them more than once for “scientifically verifiable results”. 

Kosuke Morita and team of RIKEN in Japan had been credited for the discovery of Element 113 and its close siblings. He says: “For over seven years we continued to search for data conclusively identifying Element 113, but we just never saw another event. I was not prepared to give up however, as I believed that one day, if we persevered, luck would fall upon us again.” 

Morita’s team has been credited with the confirmed discovery of Element 113, which means they’ve won the naming rights too. Until now, the element had been known by the temporary name ununtrium and the temporary chemical symbol Uut. The three remaining elements – 115, 117 and 118 – known temporarily as ununpentium (Uup), ununseptium (Uus) and ununoctium (Uuo) respectively will also get new names. 

Previous attempts to synthesize and the discovery of Element 113 and Element 115 were reported back in February 2004 following experiments carried out between July 4 and August 10, 2003. In these experiments, the primary product was the four nuclei of Element 115 isotopes. All these four nuclei decayed through the emission of u- particles to isotopes of Element 113. But the claim has not been ratified by the IUPAC back then because of a lack of scientifically verifiable reproducibility of the results. 

Ever since the discovery of Element 114 back in 1999 as the event was announced through e-mail which was then published in the April 1999 issue of Scientific American magazine by scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna near Moscow reported strong evidence that they have created the heaviest element yet, one with 114 protons and i84 neutrons, many a nuclear physicists suggest that Element 113 is critically located in an unstable region of the Periodic Table that attempts to synthesize it only resulted in the creation of more stable heavier elements of a higher atomic number. A team led by Yuri Oganesian and Vladimir Utyonkov smashed a rare isotope – calcium-48 – with a plutonium-244 target to synthesize Element 114. Element 114 lasted an astonishing 30 seconds, far longer that the 280 microseconds of the previously discovered Element 112. The relatively long life of Element 114 was taken as proof that “islands of stability” exists in the super heavy element range. 

2015 – 100th Anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity

With UNESCO marking 2015 as the International Year of Light and Light-Based Technologies, will the centenary of Einstein’s presentation of General Relativity inspire advances of current physics? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Back in November 1915, Albert Einstein presented to the world his “Theory of General Relativity” as a way to resolve another contradiction of physics not covered by his “Theory of Special Relativity” ten years before. According to Isaac Newton, gravity travelled instantly through the universe. But according to Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, nothing can go faster than light (but there’s an intriguingly convincing work by Thomas Van Flandern of the US Naval Observatory back in the mid 1970s proving otherwise that you can also check out). To overcome these incompatible views, Einstein introduced another, even grander theory in which space and time are not empty but are instead like a fabric that can be curved and stretched. This new picture – in which gravity originates from the bending of sheets of space-time – revolutionized cosmology and gave us the most compelling theory of creation, the Big Bang. 

Einstein’s Special Relativity was incomplete because it made no mention of acceleration or gravity. Einstein then made the next key observation: Motion under gravity and motion in an accelerated frame are indistinguishable. Since a light beam will bend in a rocket that is accelerating, a light beam must also bend under gravity. 

To show this, Einstein introduced the concept of curved space. In this interpretation, planets move around the sun not because of a gravitational pull but because the sun has warped the space around it, and the curvature of space itself due to the sun pushes the planets. Gravity does not pull you into a chair; space pushes on you, creating the feeling of weight. Space-time has been replaced by a fabric that can stretch and bend. 

General relativity can describe the extreme warping of space caused by the gravity of a massive dead star – a black hole. When we apply General Relativity to the universe as a whole, one solution naturally describes an expanding cosmos that originated in a fiery “Big Bang”. 

One of the simplest demonstrations using everyday objects to explain Einstein’s General Relativity that even the youngest school-kids can grasp is the bowling ball, marble and bedsheet set-up. Put a bowling ball on a bedsheet and shoot a marble past it. The marble will move in a curved line. A Newtonian physicist would say that the bowling ball exerts a “force” that “pulls” on the marble, making it move in a curved line. A Relativist would say that the ball curves the bedsheet and that the bedsheet “pushes” against the marble. This “simple” demonstration of Einstein’s General Relativity on how gravity shapes the cosmic space-time also explains why the 1919 solar eclipse observation that shows the sun’s gravitational well curving the path of starlight and the advancing perihelion of the planet Mercury that Newtonian physics is at a loss to explain why.  

Einstein’s General Relativity also shows that gravitational fields affect the flow of time – making them slow down which was only demonstrated unequivocably just recently – back in the mid 1990s - when atomic clocks were accurate enough to show the difference. Without correcting the effects of General Relativity, the Global Positioning System or GPS signals from the satellites to your receiving unit would have errors of several parts per billion – which is enough to make them useless. 

Recently, one of the most grandiose experiments to test the limits of Einstein’s General Relativity was the hunt for gravitational waves. Physicists can’t yet put the entire universe on a lab bench, but experimental tests of Einstein’s theories can now be carried out with subatomic precision. Perhaps the most elusive phenomena predicted by General Relativity – but has yet to be observed – are gravitational waves. In theory, a cataclysmic event such as a spiraling merger of two black holes should produce wavelike ripples in space-time that could still be detectible by the time they reach planet Earth. Two Earth-based observatories, Advanced LIGO and Advanced VIRGO at the University of Pisa in Italy, will look for disturbances as small as a hundred-millionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom. 

Ahmed Mohamad And America’s Post 9/11 Education Scene

Is America’s post 9/11 education scene way different than what has come before when a 14-year-old Arab-American high school freshman gets arrested for being an electronics enthusiast?

By: Ringo Bones 

During a typical Monday morning back in September 14, 2014, a 14-year-old Arab American high school freshman of MacArthur High in Irving, Texas named Ahmed Mohamad was arrested by the local police after his teacher mistakes the clock that he had worked over the weekend and bought to his class’ show-and-tell for a bomb. Later investigation showed that the uproar over the young electronic enthusiast was primarily racially motivated via the post 9/11 paranoia that is still gripping white Anglo Saxon conservative America, Ahmed Mohamad was later invited by President Barack Obama to the White House and given a commendation. Given the “politics” surrounding the incident, is the post-9/11 paranoia harbored by white Anglo Saxon Protestant America hurting, rather than helping, science education in America?   

The political blowback of the incident made Ahmed Mohamad to decide that he won’t be going back to MacArthur High anymore after being singled-out due to his ethnicity. After all, there are white Anglo Saxon Protestant high school students his age that were carrying loaded assault rifles publicly in the name of the “Open Carry Law” elsewhere in Texas and nobody dared to call them as “Christian Terrorists”?  

Is post the white Anglo Saxon Protestant Post 9/11 Paranoia destroying the social fabric of diversity in America? Ahmed Mohamad could be a case-in-point of this and it is also ruining the inclusiveness of science education in America where kids of high school freshmen are seeing science education as “uncool” thanks to former US President George “Dubya” Bush. Ahmed Mohamad’s exceptional abilities in digital electronics should have been nurtured given that when I was his age back in the 1980s, was still learning the rudiments of digital electronics –i.e. still learning about logic gates and J-K flip-flops. 

Graphene: The Wonder Material Awaiting Commercial Applications?

Even though its two discoverers already share a Nobel Physics Prize, is graphene that wonder material that’s desperately seeking commercial applications? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Even though the properties of this so-called wonder material is already familiar to materials researchers as far back as 1947, it wasn’t until the 1970s that two Manchester University physicists, Prof. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov developed a method to consistently synthesize the one-atom-thick-carbon wonder material now known as graphene, which eventually allowed them to share the 2010 Nobel Physics Prize. Given that it is 207 times stronger than steel and is a very good conductor of heat and electricity, the wonder material grapheme has defied commercial exploitation because of a lack of an economically viable way to synthesize and manufacture it, until now. 

Known as the “first lady of graphene”, Catharine Paukner, CEO and founder of Cambridge Nanosystems had recently developed an economically viable method to produce graphene on a mass scale. Using methane extracted from communal landfills and cow flatulence, Paukner has managed to convert this potent greenhouse gas (one molecule methane has 25 times the greenhouse warming effect of a single molecule of carbon dioxide) into something useful – the famed wonder material graphene. 

Already in the planning stage, Catharine Paukner’s large-scale methane to graphene plant, based on the workings of a domestic kitchen microwave oven, will be able to produce 5-metric tons of graphene a year. As a wonder material with hundreds of potential very lucrative commercial uses since it was extensively studied in the past 25 years, graphene still elude practical everyday applications due to the difficulty of producing it in quantity at a cost-effective manner. Ultra-light carbon composites more than 200 times stronger than steel for electric powered aircraft applications and replacement body parts are just some of the commercial applications that could make graphene production a potential multi-billion dollar a year industry.