QUANTUM BOXES FOR COOPER PAIRS. Quantum dots, comparable in size to the wavelength of electrons, are used to study how spatial confinement alters allowed electron energies. Recently a team of scientists from Holland, Russia, Ukraine, and Belgium (contact Andre Geim, geim@sci.kun.nl) has done the same thing for Cooper pairs, the doublets of electrons which form in superconductors. Essentially studying the size-dependence of superconductivity, these researchers use a sensitive detector to monitor the magnetization (the response to an applied magnetic field) of superconducting aluminum disks ranging in size from .1 up to 2.4 microns for a variety of temperature and field conditions. The result is an unexpected diversity of superconducting behavior for the different disk sizes, probably arising from the disks being nearly the same size as the Cooper pairs.(Apparatus, including a new form of micro-magnetometry, described in Applied Physics Letters, 20 Oct.; experimental results, Nature, 20 Nov.; numerical simulations, Physical Review Letters, 8 Dec; see image at Physics News Graphics.)