Particle Physicists Join Battle against Cancer

1. Particle physicists spend most of their time exploring the fundamental properties of matter, often with accelerators that cost hundreds of millions of pounds. However, some are also engaged in an altogether more down-to earth activity – developing new technologies for medical applications. This activity has a long history of success, which is why about 130 physicists and healthcare professionals met in London recently to discuss “the future of medical imaging and radiotherapy”. A major theme at the meeting was how technology from particle physics could be used to diagnose and treat cancer.
2. “I don’t think there is any discipline that has gained so much from technology developed for applied physics as cancer diagnosis and therapy,” says Alan Horwich of the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. “There is considerable potential for improving cancer cure rates over the next 10 to 15 years by the application of emerging imaging technologies to radiotherapy.”
3. According to Horwich, who is director of clinical research and development at the ICR, some 270000 new cases of cancer are diagnosed in the UK every year, but less than half of the cases involving the most common types of cancer – breast, prostate, lung and bowel – are cured. He told on the meeting that the accuracy of radiotherapy needed to be improved because that would reduce the exposure of normal tissue to potentially harmful levels of radiation and allow higher doses to be directed at the tumour. He also said it is important to understand how to target the most resistant parts of a tumour.

4. Technology developed by particle physicists has already led to a number of breakthroughs in medical imaging, including positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed X-ray tomography (CT) and molecular imaging. In addition, linear accelerators are used to provide energetic photons for radiotherapy. The London meeting was organized by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) to explore new technologies that could be added to this list and discuss their possible commercialization.

Answer the question: What was the London meeting organized for?

Dracula

Last lesson we practiced how to talk about our appearance.

Now I want you to read an abstrack  of the novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker.

Here there is a description of one of its characters Dr. Van Helsing:
"...a man of medium weight, strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest and a neck well balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The poise of the head strikes me at once as indicative of thought and power. The head is noble, well-sized, broad, and large behind the ears. The face, cleanshaven, shows a hard, square chin, a large resolute, mobile mouth, a good-sized nose, rather straight, but with quick, sensitive nostrils, that seem to broaden as the big bushy brows come down and the mouth tightens. The forehead is broad and fine, rising at first almost straight and then sloping back above two bumps or ridges wide apart, such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot possibly tumble over it, but falls naturally back and to the sides. Big, dark blue eyes are set widely apart, and are quick and tender or stern with the man's moods..."



Below there is a real portrait o f Vlad the Impaler; also known as Vlad Dracula. Can you describe this man?

Nanotube Circuits

1. New research suggests that networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes printed onto bendable plastic perform well as semiconductors in integrated circuits. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Purdue University say that these nanotube networks could replace organic semiconductors in applications such as flexible displays.
2. Development of flexible electronics has recently focused on organic molecules because, unlike silicon, they are compatible with bendable plastic substrates. Flexible electronics have potential in such applications as 14 15 lowpower electronic newspapers or PDAs that roll up into the size and shape of a pen. The problem with existing organic-electronic devices, however, is that “they aren’t well developed for long-term reliability, and they perform far worse than silicon,” says John A. Rogers, an engineering professor at UIUC.
3. Carbon-nanotube networks, on the other hand, combine the performance of silicon with the flexibility of organic films on plastic. Rogers says that the speed of the nanotube device compares favorably with the speed of commercially used single-crystal silicon circuits. The transistors can also switch between on and off states in the range of several kilohertz, which is similar to the range of those used for liquid crystal displays and radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors. However, the on-off current ratio for carbon nanotubes is still a few orders of magnitude lower than that for silicon transistors.
4. The researchers made the networks by depositing nanotubes onto plastic by standard printing methods, which could lead to low-cost, large-scale fabrication. And the printed circuits can bend to a radius of about five millimeters without compromising the electrical performance of the device. “This method is good for flexible electronics that need to be printed over a large area,” says Ali Javey, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.


Answer the question: What can networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes printed onto bendable plastic replace?    

Generation of multicavity entangled states with a single three-level atom

1. In recent years much attention has been paid to entanglement, which is one of the most striking features of quantum mechanics. The correlation between two systems can be used to test local hidden variable theories against quantum mechanics (Bell 1967). Maximally entangled states of three or more systems, referred to as Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states (Greenberger 1989, 1990) allow a stronger test of local hidden variable theories without using Bell’s inequalities. Besides the investigation of fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics, entangled states are useful in fields involving quantum information, such as quantum cryptography, quantum computation , and quantum teleportation.
2. A scheme, based on the resonant atom–field interaction, has been proposed for preparing two two-level atoms in a maximally entangled state. Recently, such a scheme has been experimentally realised. It has also been shown that a GHZ state of three atoms can be generated using the resonant atom–field interaction if the field is initially prepared in a superposition of a three-photon state and the vacuum state (Cirac and Zoller 1994). 

3. Other cavity QED methods have also been proposed for the preparation of multi-atom GHZ states. In a very recent paper, Sackett (2000) have reported experimental entanglement of four trapped ions using a new technique proposed.
4. On the other hand, three-photon GHZ entanglement has also been observed. Proposals have been suggested to entangle spatially separated cavities. As an intermediate step of teleportation, Davidovich (1994) have shown how to produce two-cavity entangled states, in which a single photon resides in either cavity. Using a combination of quantum switches Davidovich (1993) have proposed a scheme for the generation of the entangled coherent states (Sanders 1992a, 1992b) for two cavities. Kim and Lee (2000) have suggested a nonlocal test for entangled states of two spatially separated cavities.
Answer the question: What entangled states are useful for?

Focus on Dark Matter and Particle Physics

1. We are witnessing an era that is nothing short of a historical moment in the quest for the fundamental nature of particle dark matter. The energy frontier of the TeV, where new physics potentially connected to particle dark matter might lie, according to several theoretically very compelling scenarios, will be soon explored with the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Upgrades to current direct dark matter detectors, and the research and development of new and possibly complementary techniques to look for the scattering of particle dark matter off ordinary baryonic matter are at a fully mature stage.
2. These experimental efforts carry the promise of exploring in the very near future a large and appealing portion of the parameter space of the best motivated dark matter models. Finally, a surge of excitement has recently come from the successful launches and deployments of space-based antimatter and gamma-ray telescopes. In particular, in the last year it is fair to say that most of the phenomenological and theoretical work in the field was driven by the puzzling results from these two payloads, in an ongoing effort to understand the instrumental systematics and to explore possible astrophysical sources of background to a dark matter signal.

3. This focus issue starts with the acknowledgement of the specificity of this moment in time for the discovery of the nature of dark matter, and provides novel and updated snapshots of recent results and future directions in the field. All major topics in both experimental and theoretical aspects are comprehensively treated, starting with an authoritative bird-eye review of particle dark matter candidates by Bergstrom.
4. Given the long-standing interest for supersymmetry as one of the best motivated scenarios for particle physics beyond the standard model soon to be tested with the LHC, a contribution by Cotta specifically addresses supersymmetric dark matter candidates. A minimal setup, from the point of view of model building, is the interesting and exhaustive setup of 'minimal dark matter', here reviewed by one of its proposers in Cirelli and Strumia.

Answer the question: What is Bergstrom going to review in the article?

Oldest Supermassive Black Hole Found from Universe’s Infancy

1. Astronomers have discovered the oldest supermassive black hole ever found—a behemoth that grew to 800 million times the mass of the sun when the universe was just 5 percent of its current age, a new study finds.
2. This newfound giant black hole, which formed just 690 million years after the Big Bang, could one day help shed light on a number of cosmic mysteries, such as how black holes could have reached gargantuan sizes quickly after the Big Bang and how the universe got cleared of the murky fog that once filled the entire cosmos, the researchers said in the new study.

3. Supermassive black holes with masses millions to billions of times that of the sun are thought to lurk at the hearts of most, if not all, galaxies. Previous research suggested these giants release extraordinarily large amounts of light when they rip apart stars and devour matter, and likely are the driving force behind quasars, which are among the brightest objects in the universe. Astronomers can detect quasars from the farthest corners of the cosmos, making quasars among the most distant objects known. The farthest quasars are also the earliest known quasars—the more distant one is, the more time its light took to reach Earth.
4. Right after the Big Bang, the universe was a rapidly expanding hot soup of ions, or electrically charged particles. About 380,000 years later, these ions cooled and coalesced into neutral hydrogen gas. The universe stayed dark until gravity pulled matter together into the first stars. The intense ultraviolet light from this era caused this murky neutral hydrogen to get excited and ionize, or gain electric charge, and the gas has remained in that state since that time. Once the universe became reionized, light could travel freely through space.


Answer the question: What do supermassive black holes release while absorbing stars or devouring matter?