Friday, April 04, 2008

Very Hard, I would imagine

In the Wall Street Journal today: UBS Shares Rally on Breakup Push
By CARRICK MOLLENKAMP and KATHARINA BART

The article discusses UBS, a Swiss Bank that's been having problems recently
"It's hard to make a case to someone wealthy that you can manage their money well when you've just lost $37 billion yourself," said Dirk Hoffmann-Becking, an analyst at Bernstein Research in London.

Are Neutrinos their own antiparticles?

ARE NEUTRINOS MAJORANA PARTICLES?
Photons are their own antiparticles, could that be true of neutrinos as well? There is an experiment which can tell - neutrinoless double beta decay. Unfortunately this is a difficult experiment.

Nanowriting

Floating Tip Nanolithography
We demonstrate noncontact, high quality surface modification with spatial resolution of ~20 nm. The nanowriting is based on the interaction between the surface and the tip of an Atomic force microscope illuminated by a focused laser beam and hovering 1-4 nanometers above the surface without touching it. The floating tip nanowriting is compared to mechanical surface scratching, and is found to be much more reproducible, and of higher quality. In an Apertureless Scanning Near Field Optical Microscope geometry the tip is illuminated by a focused femtosecond laser, leading to two different, clearly identifiable mechanisms for removing material from the surface: when heated by the laser beam, the hot-tip thermally patterns the surface of low melting temperature soft materials, and when focused right at the apex of the sharp tip, the enhanced electric field of the laser beam causes ablation in high melting temperature metal films.