Physics News Update, Number 454

Number 454, October 26, 1999 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein

GRAVITY'S GRAVITY. A new experiment at the University of Washington seeks to determine whether the gravitational binding energy of an object generates gravity of its own. As formulated by Albert Einstein, the Equivalence Principle (EP) states that if we stand in a closed room we cannot tell whether the weight we feel is the result of gravity pulling down or the force of a rocket carrying us forward through otherwise empty space. All of this gets complicated in some theories of gravity, which predict that the EP will be violated to a small degree since in addition to the usual gravity, carried from place to place by spin-two particles called gravitons, there should exist another, fainter kind of gravity carried by spin-zero particles (sometimes called dilatons). For this reason, and because recent observations of supernovas suggest that some repulsive gravitational effects might be at work in the cosmos, scientists want to explore the possibility of EP violations. Three decades of lunar laser ranging (bouncing light off reflectors placed on the Moon) show that the Moon and the Earth fall toward the Sun with the same acceleration to within half a part in a trillion (10¹²). What the Washington physicists (Eric Adelberger, 206-543-4294, eric@gluon.npl.washington.edu) have done is focus attention on the subject of gravitational binding energy, or self-energy, and whether it too obeys the EP. To illustrate the concept of binding energy, consider that the mass of an alpha particle is actually about 28 MeV less than the sum of its constituents. This energy (about 7.6 parts in a thousand of the alpha mass) represents the energy (vested in the strong nuclear force) needed to hold two protons and two neutrons together inside the alpha. Gravity being very much weaker than the strong nuclear force, the gravitational binding energy, the self-energy of gravity attraction, is almost infinitesimal. For example, self-energy effectively reduces the mass energy of the Earth by a factor of only about 4.6 parts in 10¹⁰. Is this tiny "mass" also subject to the EP? Supplementing existing lunar laser ranging results with new data from special test masses mounted on a sensitive torsion balance (see www.aip.org/png) to take into account the different compositions of the Earth and Moon, the Washington physicists show that gravitational self energy does obey the equivalence principle at the level of at least one part in a thousand. Thus gravitational self energy does indeed generate its own gravity. (Baessler et al., Physical Review Letters, 1 November - see Select Articles; see also Clifford Will's article, Physics Today, Oct 1999.)

VACUUM TUBES ATTEMPT A COMEBACK. Vacuum tubes were the backbone of the electronics industry until the 1960s, when their large size, excessive power dissipation, and lack of integration allowed solid-state technology to win out. Now forests of 100-nm sized nanotriodes might bring vacuum designs back, at least for niche applications. Researchers at the University of Cambridge (Alexander Driskill-Smith, David Hasko, and Haroon Ahmed, aagd100@cus.cam.ac.uk, 011-44-1223-337556) have made an anode-gate-cathode device in which the cathode consists of multiple nanopillars which can be crowded together in a dense formation. This will eventually enable nanotriode densities of 10⁹ per cm² (including interconnects) to be reached, comparable with the best packing densities for metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistors, the electronics industry workhorse. Shooting electrons through vacuum rather than a semiconductor not only makes switching fast (the ballistic electrons always travel without scattering), but gives nanotriodes a few advantages over MOS technology: the nanotriodes are radiation resistant, operate well at high and low temperatures, and, because they are vertically-oriented, will permit integration in the third dimension, allowing even greater packing densities. Electrons (or, more accurately, the electron waves) issuing from the nanopillars are coherent and highly focused, and might be useful for doing holography or nanolithography. Remaining problems with this vacuum design include a relatively high operating voltage (10 V) for large scale integration applications and the reproducibility and longevity of the nanotriodes. (Applied Physics Letters, 1 November 1999: for journalists the text is available at Select Articles.)

CORRECTIONS: 1. Diamonds precipitated from methane in an anvil press (Update 451) squeezed up to pressures of 50 GPa, equivalent to 0.5 (not 10) million atm. 2. One can contemplate, at least in principle, the wave behavior of bowling balls (not bawls; Update 453)