ESA european space agency Ariane program 80 launches to date, 134 spacecraft into orbit, 50% of world's commercial satellite launches. Vulcan engine, liquid hydrogen oxygen. 2 solid boosters. Ariane 5 : Xray multimirror mission 1999,, Far IR and Submillimeter space telescope in 2005. /*---------------------------------------------------------------------*/ Ariane 5 Launches Armada of Plasma Probes to study magnetosphere in 3D. The electron drift instrument (EDI) on satellites will shoot out beams , electrons in an effort to study the electric field in the magnetosphere. The magnetic field will exert a force on the moving electrons, bending their path into a huge circle, (few kilometers across). The electric field also exerts a force, perpendicular to the circle, which bends the electron's path into a helix. /*---------------------------------------------------------------------*/ Schizophernic atom Doubles as Schrodinger's Cat - or Kitten Schrodinger's cat is elusive, but we've trapped one in a lab. 60 years ago, Erwin Schrodinger (Austria) described a cat shut up in what he called a diabolical device; a closed box also containing a small amount of a radioactive substance. Over the course of an hour, the radioactive substance has a 50-50 chance of decaying. If it does, the decay is detected by a counter, which shatters a flask of deadly acid, killing the cat. If it doesn't the cat lives. The indeterminacy of the atomic world, which governs radioactive decay, has now been transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy. Until an observer looks into the box, the quantum state of the radioactive substance is half decayed, half undecayed. And so the cat must also be in a superposition of states, neither dead nor alive, but half of each. Since schrodinger put for this his feline thought experiment, we've wondered whether the weirdness of quantum world would inevitably evaporate when magnified to classical dimensions. Now, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has succeeded in turning it into physical reality. NIST Physicists chris Monroe and Wineland trap a single beryllium ion in an electromagnetic cage, excite in into a superposition of internal electronic quantum states, then ease those two states apart so that the atom appears to be in two distinct physical locations simultaneously. The result can be considered the anti-vivisectionist version of the dead-and-alive superposition of cat states. Experiment illustrates a quantum effect known as decoherence. Monroe et al, snare the cat (beryllium ion) by letting it drift into an electromagnetic trap as a neutral atom, then stripping off one of its electrons. The resulting ion suddenly feels the electromagnetic cage around it and is trapped inside. The next step is to cool the ion using lasers until it settles virtually motionless at the center of the trap. Now the ion can't squirm away,, the physicists use a pair of laser beams of slightly different colors to coax it into a superposition of internal quantum states, in this case, states known as spin up and spin down hyperfine states that correspond to the quantum indeterminacy of Schrodinger's radioactive atom. At any one time, the ion has 50-50 chance of being in one of the two states. Then they push the two states apart, turning the quantum indeterminacy into a physical indeterminacy like that of the fabled cat. They do so by applying another pair of laser beams (force beams) that interfere to create a wave that jostles the ion at a frequency matching its natural oscillation frequency in the trap. The resulting force gets the ion moving much like the periodic force you might exert to get a child moving on a swing. The lasers are tuned so they only effect one of the hyperfine states and not the other. By changing the tuning of the lasers set one hyperfine state in motion, the the other, out of phase with the first. We have spin-down state sloshing to and fro and spin up state sloshing fro and to. If you freeze time you have an atom at position one with its internal state in spin up and the same atom at position two with its internal state in spin down. To measure the distance between the two states, first push them back together until they overlap and interfere with each other. How much the phase of the force lasers has to be changed before the the states overlap tells the physicists how far apart the states were to begin with. 80nanometers, gap bigger than the wave packets themselves. This physical separation of a single ion's quantum states is what qualifies as Schrodinger's cat. We're realizing this condition where we have two parts of this quantum mechanical system that are separated by a mesoscopic distance. So this paradoxical situation seems in fact to exist at least on a small scale. A. Leggett of Uof I "The two states superimposed should have properties that are demonstratively macroscopically distinct like living and dead states of the Schrodinger's cat not just being physically 80 nanometers apart. Studying decoherence, in which a quantum system coupled to the environment at large tends to lose its ability to exist simultaneously in a quantum superposition of states. /*---------------------------------------------------------------------*/ A Schrodinger Cat superposition state of an atom A "Schrodinger Cat" Like state of matter was generated at the single atom level. A trapped Be+ ion was laser-cooled to the zero-point energy and then prepared in a superposition of spatially separated coherent harmonic oscillator states. This state was created by application of a sequence of laser pulses, which entangles internal (electronic) and external motional states of the ion. The Schrodinger cat superposition was verified by detection of the quantum mechanical interference between the localized wave packets. This mesoscopic system may provide insight in to the fuzzy boundary between the classical and quantum worlds by allowing controlled studies of quantum measurement and quantum decoherence. /*---------------------------------------------------------------------*/ The self-assembly mechanism of Alkanethiols on Au (111) Self assembly of amphiphilic molecules into highly ordered monolayer films on metal surfaces has potential applications in biosensing, biomimetics and corrosion inhibition. /*---------------------------------------------------------------------*/