In case you missed it (ICYMI), here are some of the stories that made headlines in the world of cleanrooms and nanotechnology in the past week.
A group of scientists from ITMO University in Russia has put forward a new approach to effective manipulation of light at the nanoscale based on hybrid metal-dielectric nanoantennas. The new technology is a driver for developing new platform for ultra-dense optical data recording and for producing a wide range of optical nanodevices capable of localizing, enhancing, and manipulating light at the nanoscale.
Scientists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the Department of Physics at the University of Basel have developed a new method that has enabled them to image magnetic fields on the nanometer scale at temperatures close to absolute zero for the first time. They used spins in special diamonds as quantum sensors in a new kind of microscope to generate images of magnetic fields in superconductors with unrivalled precision. In this way the researchers were able to perform measurements that permit new insights in solid state physics.
Finally, the world’s largest particle collider at CERN near Geneva was still on temporary standby mode this weekend, after reports that a weasel gnawed on a cable and caused a power outage. “Standby mode” for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) means that the beams and collisions are not running. Work was safely stopped immediately, and repairs should only take a few days. Unlike the LHC, though, the weasel did not survive. (This isn’t even the first time an odd event has halted work at CERN — in 2009 a piece of bread, likely dropped either by a bird or a plane, interrupted a power installation for an LHC cooling unit.)