Magazine Ranks Two UTD Discoveries
Among Top 100 Science Stories of 2005
Two scientific discoveries at The University of Texas at Dallas last year were ranked among the top 100 science stories of 2005 in Discover magazine.
The development of carbon nanotube sheets and the discovery of a mysterious new subatomic particle are ranked the eighth and 70th science stories of 2005, respectively, in the January 2006 issue of Discover.
In its annual special report, the science and technology magazine described 2005 as “surely the most remarkable year in science ever,” and reflected on stories that “changed our world forever.”
From left: Nanotechnologists Mei Zhang, Ray Baughman and Shaoli Fang sit while Ali Aliev, Sergey Lee and Anvar Zakhidov remain standing.
The team sees potential commercial uses for their discovery.
At No. 8 is UTD’s announcement last August that Dr. Ray Baughman, director of the NanoTech Institute, and his colleagues, with the help of Australian wool spinners, had found a way to weave carbon nanotubes – microscopic bits of string – into usefully large materials, and produced transparent sheets allowing them to exploit their remarkable properties.
Bursting with Strength
Carbon nanotube sheets, for instance, are nine times stronger than same-weight steel sheets and can transmit 1,000 times as much electrical current as copper.
Baughman reported sheets so thin that “an acre of the material weighs just a quarter of a pound. They also can withstand more than 34,000 pounds per square inch of force without tearing and can endure temperatures as high as 840 degrees Fahrenheit without losing strength or conductivity.”
The discovery promises a wide range of innovative products, including demonstrated applicability for organic light-emitting displays; low-noise electronic sensors; artificial muscles; conducting appliqués; broad-band polarized light sources that can be switched on in one ten-thousandths of a second.
Meanwhile, Discover reports two teams of scientists are developing medical applications, taking advantage of the human body’s ability to absorb carbon.
It said chemists at Stanford University have fabricated cancer-killing nanotubes that sneak inside tumor cells, and researchers at the University of California at Riverside are using nanotubes to speed healing of broken bones.
Rattling Physics
The other UTD-related discovery, that of a new subatomic particle, ranked No. 70 of Discover’s top 100 science stories of 2005. Discovery of the particle, dubbed Y (4260), was disclosed in July.
Four scientists from UTD’s High Energy Physics Group – Dr. Shuwei Ye, lead researcher; physics Professor Joseph Izen, Ph.D.; Dr. Xinchou Lou, head of the Physics Department; and Ph.D. candidate Glenn Williams – were instrumental in the discovery.
From left: UTD physics professors Joseph Izen, Ph.D.; Xinchou Lou, Ph.D., head of the Physics Department;and researcher Shuwei Ye, Ph.D., helped discover a new particle.
Y (4260) has reportedly appeared about 100 times after billions of collisions of electrons and positrons recorded by the BaBar detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Discover wrote that while the particle’s existence seems certain, what exactly it may be is anybody’s guess. It said its mere existence calls into question what physicists know about the composition of matter.
“Y (4260) was a surprise, and we are just beginning to make sense of its peculiar mass and the unusual way it decays,” Izen said in July. “It's quite an unusual discovery.”
Lou echoed Izen’s assessment at the time, characterizing the new particle as “kind of mysterious to us. We are looking at our data to understand what it is and if it has ‘siblings.’”
The magazine reported that researchers say the properties of Y (4260) imply that it contains one particular combination of two quarks, known as a charm quark and an anticharm quark. But its mass and the manner in which it decays run counter to theoretical expectations for a particle composed of those two quarks.
“We thought we understood how you can combine quarks and antiquarks into matter, but this doesn’t fit that pattern,” David McFarlane, a spokesman for the BaBar experiment, was quoted as saying. “It suggests that there may be a whole new spectrum of matter due to the more exotic combinations of quarks.”
The BaBar experiment is an international collaboration of 600 physicists and engineers investigating the fundamental nature of matter and the laws that govern it.
Updated: 2006-01-25
