Can we scale down robots to small scales and realize them with self-organizing molecules? As biological cells already act a little like robots – they sense, compute, move, and respond to their environment – the answer is probably “yes”. But a wide range of interesting physical challenges have to be tackled.
{"title":"Tiny robots made from biomolecules","authors":"T. Pirzer, F. Simmel","doi":"10.1051/epn/2022304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2022304","url":null,"abstract":"Can we scale down robots to small scales and realize them with self-organizing molecules? As biological cells already act a little like robots – they sense, compute, move, and respond to their environment – the answer is probably “yes”. But a wide range of interesting physical challenges have to be tackled.","PeriodicalId":52467,"journal":{"name":"Europhysics News","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76285374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T he 2021 Nobel prize in Physics honours three outstanding scientist who, broadly speaking, have been working on complex systems: The decision of the Nobel prize committee was setting a signpost for the importance of modelling, understanding and tackling climate change (the work of Manabe and Hasselmann), and for the theoretical modelling and understanding of complex systems in general (the work of Parisi). See Europhysics News 52/5 for more detailed information on the prize winners and their work. The current EPN issue contains two articles of K. Binder and M. Mezard related to spin glasses — one of the major cornerstones of Parisi’s work in the 1980s. These systems can be regarded as physical examples of complex systems that have played an important role in the historical development of statistical physics, exhibiting typical features such as power-law decay of correlations and very long relaxation times. Glasses are in a kind of permanent nonequilibrium state. So are many complex systems, driven by external forces and influences in a heterogeneous way, which are these days investigated in a variety of sub-disciplines. Methods used by the Nobel prize winners are highly cross-disciplinary and universally applicable and often based on stochastic modelling via stochastic differential equations. For example, the famous Parisi-Wu stochastic quantization method is just reducing path integrals (of utmost relevance in any quantum field theory) to expectation values over higher-dimensional Brownian motion trajectories in a fictitious time coordinate—thus connecting Fokker-Planck and Langevin equations used in classical nonequilibrium problems to quantum field theory. Similarly, the work of Hasselmann uses stochastic differential equations to model climate change, where the short-scale fluctuations (modelled by noise in the stochastic differential equation) corresponds to short-scale weather effects influencing the long-term climate dynamics. The decision of the Nobel prize committee for the 2021 Physics prize, in a sense, signals what statistical physics, in its generalized sense, has evolved to in recent decades: Towards a highly cross-disciplinary science with applications not only in physics, but connecting many different areas of science, relevant for the most important topics such as climate change that need to be solved to guarantee a sustainable future. Environmental issues such as climate tipping points, air pollution dynamics, the dynamics of sustainable power grids, or the infection dynamics of the Covid-19 pandemic, draw in crowds of the next generations of statistical physicists, for good reasons, as this research is of utmost interest to guarantee a healthy and sustainable environment for the future of mankind, and at the same time produces highly interesting theoretical research aspects. Statistical physics methods are also used to understand cities as complex systems, as well as the dynamics of living organisms (see Europhysics News 51/5)
{"title":"Complex systems: the amazing cross-disciplinary journey of statistical physics","authors":"C. Beck","doi":"10.1051/epn/2022103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2022103","url":null,"abstract":"T he 2021 Nobel prize in Physics honours three outstanding scientist who, broadly speaking, have been working on complex systems: The decision of the Nobel prize committee was setting a signpost for the importance of modelling, understanding and tackling climate change (the work of Manabe and Hasselmann), and for the theoretical modelling and understanding of complex systems in general (the work of Parisi). See Europhysics News 52/5 for more detailed information on the prize winners and their work. The current EPN issue contains two articles of K. Binder and M. Mezard related to spin glasses — one of the major cornerstones of Parisi’s work in the 1980s. These systems can be regarded as physical examples of complex systems that have played an important role in the historical development of statistical physics, exhibiting typical features such as power-law decay of correlations and very long relaxation times. Glasses are in a kind of permanent nonequilibrium state. So are many complex systems, driven by external forces and influences in a heterogeneous way, which are these days investigated in a variety of sub-disciplines. Methods used by the Nobel prize winners are highly cross-disciplinary and universally applicable and often based on stochastic modelling via stochastic differential equations. For example, the famous Parisi-Wu stochastic quantization method is just reducing path integrals (of utmost relevance in any quantum field theory) to expectation values over higher-dimensional Brownian motion trajectories in a fictitious time coordinate—thus connecting Fokker-Planck and Langevin equations used in classical nonequilibrium problems to quantum field theory. Similarly, the work of Hasselmann uses stochastic differential equations to model climate change, where the short-scale fluctuations (modelled by noise in the stochastic differential equation) corresponds to short-scale weather effects influencing the long-term climate dynamics. The decision of the Nobel prize committee for the 2021 Physics prize, in a sense, signals what statistical physics, in its generalized sense, has evolved to in recent decades: Towards a highly cross-disciplinary science with applications not only in physics, but connecting many different areas of science, relevant for the most important topics such as climate change that need to be solved to guarantee a sustainable future. Environmental issues such as climate tipping points, air pollution dynamics, the dynamics of sustainable power grids, or the infection dynamics of the Covid-19 pandemic, draw in crowds of the next generations of statistical physicists, for good reasons, as this research is of utmost interest to guarantee a healthy and sustainable environment for the future of mankind, and at the same time produces highly interesting theoretical research aspects. Statistical physics methods are also used to understand cities as complex systems, as well as the dynamics of living organisms (see Europhysics News 51/5)","PeriodicalId":52467,"journal":{"name":"Europhysics News","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74932274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
One of the most crucial and challenging development of the last decades has been the discovery that environment is fragile. Read about it in Chapter 5 of the EPS Challenges for Physics.
过去几十年最重要和最具挑战性的发展之一是发现环境是脆弱的。阅读《EPS物理挑战》第5章。
{"title":"Physics for environment and sustainable development","authors":"L. Cifarelli, C. Hidalgo","doi":"10.1051/epn/2022505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2022505","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most crucial and challenging development of the last decades has been the discovery that environment is fragile. Read about it in Chapter 5 of the EPS Challenges for Physics.","PeriodicalId":52467,"journal":{"name":"Europhysics News","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75857800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
O. Gröning, Samuel Stolz, Jan-Hendrik Prinz, Harrald Brune, R. Widmer
In his seminal 1959 lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” Richard Feynman has put forward two challenges [1] .The first was to shrink letters to a size, which allowed writing the whole Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin - which was achieved in 1985 [2].The second challenge read: “It is my intention to offer a prize of $1,000 to the first guy who makes a rotating electric motor which can be controlled from the outside and, not counting the lead-in wires, is only 1/64th inch cubed” [1].
{"title":"When a molecular motor does the quantum leap","authors":"O. Gröning, Samuel Stolz, Jan-Hendrik Prinz, Harrald Brune, R. Widmer","doi":"10.1051/epn/2022405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2022405","url":null,"abstract":"In his seminal 1959 lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” Richard Feynman has put forward two challenges [1] .The first was to shrink letters to a size, which allowed writing the whole Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin - which was achieved in 1985 [2].The second challenge read: “It is my intention to offer a prize of $1,000 to the first guy who makes a rotating electric motor which can be controlled from the outside and, not counting the lead-in wires, is only 1/64th inch cubed” [1].","PeriodicalId":52467,"journal":{"name":"Europhysics News","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73043525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Grand Challenges for physics","authors":"C. Hidalgo, David M. Lee","doi":"10.1051/epn/2022501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2022501","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52467,"journal":{"name":"Europhysics News","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83261732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the second part of the 20th century, the social contract between science and society was merely a tacit agreement foreseeing that public money would finance the research that would sustain technology development and innovation and enhance the socio-economic well-being of our society. The spheres of science, politics, and society were largely separate. Today this model has changed. Chapter 7 of the EPS Challenges for Physics deals with this issue.
{"title":"Science for society","authors":"Christopher S. Rossel, L. van Dyck","doi":"10.1051/epn/2022507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2022507","url":null,"abstract":"During the second part of the 20th century, the social contract between science and society was merely a tacit agreement foreseeing that public money would finance the research that would sustain technology development and innovation and enhance the socio-economic well-being of our society. The spheres of science, politics, and society were largely separate. Today this model has changed. Chapter 7 of the EPS Challenges for Physics deals with this issue.","PeriodicalId":52467,"journal":{"name":"Europhysics News","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87018045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
C. Foti, Elsi-Mari Borrelli, D. Cavalcanti, Rosario Maniscalco, Boris Sokolov, S. Maniscalco
Today the term ‘quantum’ is often encountered in the media, not only in connection with scientific research and technology, but also in combination with almost anything that may come to mind. You can find quantum chocolate, the quantum car, soap, love, the mind, the soul, etc. This reflects, on one hand, how the notion of quantum physics is somehow associated to efficiency and technological power, but also how the counterintuitive behaviour of quantum mechanics remains elusive to most people. As we are entering an era of quantum technologies, it is essential to shed some light on the basic principles of quantum physics. Games can provide a versatile and fun way to immerse people from all backgrounds to the counterintuitive rules of the quantum world.
{"title":"Quantum games - a way to shed light on quantum mechanics","authors":"C. Foti, Elsi-Mari Borrelli, D. Cavalcanti, Rosario Maniscalco, Boris Sokolov, S. Maniscalco","doi":"10.1051/epn/2022403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2022403","url":null,"abstract":"Today the term ‘quantum’ is often encountered in the media, not only in connection with scientific research and technology, but also in combination with almost anything that may come to mind. You can find quantum chocolate, the quantum car, soap, love, the mind, the soul, etc. This reflects, on one hand, how the notion of quantum physics is somehow associated to efficiency and technological power, but also how the counterintuitive behaviour of quantum mechanics remains elusive to most people. As we are entering an era of quantum technologies, it is essential to shed some light on the basic principles of quantum physics. Games can provide a versatile and fun way to immerse people from all backgrounds to the counterintuitive rules of the quantum world.","PeriodicalId":52467,"journal":{"name":"Europhysics News","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75526618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Any kind of sculpted particle beams from high-energy photons (X-rays and gamma rays), electrons, protons, neutrons to various atomic nuclei and more exotic species have been used to treat cancer. The development of a next generation of accelerators to face the challenges and issues of Particle Therapy is crucial. What are the most promising accelerator techniques, particles or dose delivery modes?
{"title":"Accelerators for health: From current to dream machines","authors":"A. Faus-Golfe, E. Benedetto","doi":"10.1051/epn/2022302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2022302","url":null,"abstract":"Any kind of sculpted particle beams from high-energy photons (X-rays and gamma rays), electrons, protons, neutrons to various atomic nuclei and more exotic species have been used to treat cancer. The development of a next generation of accelerators to face the challenges and issues of Particle Therapy is crucial. What are the most promising accelerator techniques, particles or dose delivery modes?","PeriodicalId":52467,"journal":{"name":"Europhysics News","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83473560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embarking on the Second Quantum Revolution","authors":"K. Borras","doi":"10.1051/epn/2022402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2022402","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52467,"journal":{"name":"Europhysics News","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84407007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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