YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: MATHEMATICS-AND-PHYS-SCIENCES

ASTRONOMY (For information on eclipses and other standard astronomical events due to take place in 1997, see Table.) For astronomy, 1996 would probably be remembered as the year in which scientists announced evidence for ancient life in a meteorite thought to have originated on Mars. It was also a year in which astronomers discovered a host of extrasolar planets, some perhaps with the physical and chemical conditions necessary to harbour life as it is known on Earth. Amateur astronomers and the public alike delighted in Comet Hyakutake, the most spectacular comet seen in two decades. Orbiting Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope produced a remarkable image of the most ancient galaxies in the universe found to date. CHEMISTRY Nuclear Chemistry. In 1996 scientists at Germany's Institute for Heavy Ion Research (GSI) in Darmstadt added a new entry to the periodic table with the creation of element 112. The element, so far unnamed, was synthesized by a multinational team headed by Peter Armbruster (see BIOGRAPHIES) and Sigurd Hofmann. The researchers first accelerated a beam of zinc ions to high energies in GSI's heavy-ion accelerator UNILAC. They then shot the ions into a lead target, whereupon the zinc and lead nuclei fused. The team detected a single nucleus of the new element consisting of 112 protons and 165 neutrons, which gives it an atomic mass of 277. It was thus the heaviest nucleus ever created in the laboratory. GSI teams previously had discovered several other new chemical elements, including two--elements 110 and 111--in 1994 alone. Like other superheavy elements created in the past, element 112 decays in a small fraction of a second, but its discovery provided encouragement that scientists would soon succeed in efforts to create element 114. Theoretical studies predicted that beginning at element 114, the periodic table contains an "island of stability"--a region of comparatively long-lived superheavy elements that would be easier for scientists to use in their studies of the composition and properties of matter. Francium is a short-lived radioactive element created naturally in trace amounts in uranium deposits; its longest-lived isotope, francium-223, has a half-life of 21 minutes. Francium's fleeting existence has made it difficult for scientists to study its properties. Luis A. Orozco, Gene D. Sprouse, and associates at the State University of New York at Stony Brook developed a way to create francium atoms and trap them in a glass bulb. They bombarded a gold target with oxygen-18 atoms, creating atoms of francium-210, which then were moved into a glass bulb having a reflective coating that kept the atoms from escaping. Fortified with laser beams and a magnetic field, the bulb held the francium atoms for only about 20 seconds before they decayed or escaped, but new atoms were continuously produced, so about 1,000 were constantly present inside. The apparatus set the stage for the first detailed studies of francium's atomic characteristics. Organic Chemistry. The buckminsterfullerene molecule, nicknamed buckyball and symbolized C60, consists of 60 carbon atoms bound together into a three-dimensional spherical cage with a bonding structure that looks like the seams on a soccer ball. Named for its resemblance to the geodesic domes created by the late U.S. engineer and architect R. Buckminster Fuller, the molecule has fascinated scientists and the public since the 1980s, when it was first discovered. C60 recently was proclaimed "The Most Beautiful Molecule" in a popular book of that title, yet by the mid-1990s no major commercial or industrial application for the material had emerged. During the year Ben Z. Tang and Nai-Ten Yu of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, reported what they hailed as the first such application. They discovered that C60 has novel optical properties that allow it to block light of specific wavelengths over most of the ultraviolet and visible spectrum. Tang and Yu developed transparent materials incorporating C60 that filter out harmful ultraviolet wavelengths and block or limit transmission of other undesirable wavelengths. Traditional techniques for manufacturing glass and plastic light-filtering materials were complex and costly; making coloured glass filters, for instance, involved high-temperature processes that required multiple steps and consumed large amounts of energy. By contrast, the process for making filter materials with C60 was gel-based and was carried out at room temperature. Furthermore, changing the optical properties of the filter required adjusting only one variable, the quantity of C60 itself. Chemists long have recognized that the internal cavity of the buckminsterfullerene cage, which measures seven angstroms () in diameter, could act as a container for atoms. (An angstrom is a ten-billionth of a metre.) The cavity is large enough to hold an atom of any element in the periodic table and thus could serve as the basis for the synthesis of a range of commercially valuable endohedral (inside-the-cage) chemical species. Among the most alluring were metal-atom-containing C60 complexes, or endohedral metallofullerenes, which could, for example, provide a new and useful family of superconductors. Getting large metal atoms inside the cavity by opening holes in the cage, however, was proving difficult. Yves Rubin and co-workers at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported their creation of the largest hole yet opened in buckminsterfullerene. Moreover, they succeeded in attaching a cobalt atom over the hole with a bridge of carbon atoms, although the hole was not large enough for the metal atom to slip inside. Rubin's group speculated that it might be possible to move the cobalt atom inside, a process they termed "stuffing the turkey," by thermally exciting the complex to stretch the hole. Researchers at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., reported the first direct method for alkynylation of carbon-hydrogen bonds, an advance that other chemists described as "unique" and "unprecedented." The technique allowed chemists to attach alkyne groups to hydrocarbons, ethers, and other commercially important organic molecules faster, easier, and in higher yields than previously possible. Alkynes are hydrocarbons like acetylene (ethyne; HCCH) that contain a carbon-carbon triple bond. Traditional alkynylation techniques were inefficient and difficult and involved multiple reactions. The single-step technique was discovered serendipitously by Philip L. Fuchs and Jianchun Gong. PHYSICS In 1996 scientists produced the first atoms of antimatter--specifically, antihydrogen atoms--in a long-awaited confirmation of fundamental theory. (See Sidebar.) At the other end of the periodic table, an atom of element 112, heavier than any other known element, was synthesized for the first time. (See Chemistry.) Experiments involving the trapping and observation of single atoms furthered investigations into the strange properties of the quantum world, while several results in particle-physics research raised questions about possible flaws in the standard model. In the continuing debate over the age of the universe, astrophysicists appeared to be converging on an agreed value, although one that posed considerable problems for theorists. Advances in ultrahigh-vacuum techniques coupled with high-precision laser spectroscopy allowed physicists to carry out some of the most fascinating experiments of the year. Single atoms and ions could be trapped and held for hours, even weeks, and their interactions with electromagnetic fields explored in minute detail with high-precision lasers. One of the greatest subjects of contention in the past few decades has been the precise nature of the electromagnetic field, which is most familiar as the propagating electromagnetic radiation called light. Since the invention of the laser, the concept of the photon as a fundamental "particle of light," or quantized packet of electromagnetic energy, has had to be rediscussed and refined. Strangely, although the quantum nature of light was postulated by Albert Einstein in 1905, not until quite recently did unambiguous evidence of this quantization exist. During the year two groups of researchers, using single atoms, carried out work that demonstrated the nature of these quantum effects and even pointed the way forward toward the possibility of quantum computers. An experiment conducted by David Wineland and colleagues of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colo., made use of a single beryllium ion. The ion was held at ultrahigh vacuum in an ion-confinement device called a Paul trap by a radio-frequency field, cooled until nearly motionless, and observed as it executed simple harmonic oscillation in the field. At the extremely low energies involved, the oscillatory motion was quantized. The ion could possess only one particular energy out of a "staircase" of energies, for which the energy difference between two stairs was a quantized packet of oscillatory energy called a phonon. Energy is gained or lost by the absorption or emission of a phonon. The situation was identical to that of a single vibrational mode of an electromagnetic field, with the difference being that for the field, the energy steps are photons and the total field energy is defined by the total number of photons in the mode. The electromagnetic field may exist in different "states," which can be defined only by measuring the probability of detecting a number of photons. This probability distribution is different, depending on whether the source of light is a laser or a conventional light source. In the ion-oscillation experiment, similar probability distributions of phonons could be produced, and the oscillation could be stimulated in classical and quantum states. Among other experiments, the group claimed to have prepared a beryllium ion in "Schrdinger's cat" states--states that are a superposition of two different possible results of a measurement. In the 1930s quantum theory pioneer Erwin Schrdinger proposed his famous thought experiment, in which a cat in a closed box appears to be both alive and dead at the same time until someone observes it, as a demonstration of the philosophical paradoxes involved in quantum theory. The possibility of the experiment's actually being done could have far-reaching effects on the heated philosophical debate about the meaning of quantum theory. On the practical side, atoms held in two different superposed quantum states could serve as logic elements in quantum computers, which might be able to make use of the superpositions to carry out many calculations simultaneously. In an experiment almost the reverse of the one discussed above, Serge Haroche and co-workers of the cole Normale Suprieure, Paris, isolated and counted a small number of photons in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Their "photon trap" was a cavity 3 cm (1.2 in) in length, bounded by two curved superconducting mirrors. To detect the trapped photons, the experimenters projected atoms of rubidium through the cavity, one at a time. Each atom had been carefully prepared in a single excited state that survived long enough to cross the cavity. As the atom crossed, it exchanged energy with the electromagnetic field inside. Counting the number of atoms that arrived in an excited or de-excited state gave the experimenters a direct picture of the interactions in the field. The picture confirmed directly that the energy states of the field in the cavity were quantized. In elementary-particle physics, confirmation of the existence of the top quark in 1995 appeared to complete the experimental evidence for the standard model, which describes all matter in terms of the interactions between six leptons (particles like the electron and its neutrino) and six quarks (which make up particles like protons and neutrons). On the other hand, the team at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago that discovered the top quark also found evidence suggesting that quarks may themselves consist of something even smaller. The evidence came from the results of extremely high-energy collisions between protons and antiprotons. Observations of particle jets produced by such collisions showed that, for jet energies above 350 GeV (billion electron volts), the experimental results appeared to diverge dramatically from those predicted by quantum chromodynamics, that part of the standard model that describes the interaction of quarks via the strong nuclear force. A theory of elementary particles that goes beyond the standard model is that of supersymmetry. The theory predicts that every known fundamental particle has a supersymmetric partner. If the particle is a carrier of one of the fundamental forces, like the photon (which carries the electromagnetic force) or the gluon (which carries the strong force), the partner is of the non-force-carrying kind, like quarks or leptons. Likewise, non-force-carrying particles have their force-carrying supersymmetric partners. Researchers working with the Karlsruhe Rutherford Medium Energy Neutrino (KARMEN) experiment at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Eng., claimed to have observed results that suggest the existence of a photino, the supersymmetric partner of the photon. Similarly, researchers at Fermilab identified particle-collision events that suggested the creation of selectrons, the supersymmetric partners of electrons. Other explanations, however, were possible for both results. Data from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector at the Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory added to evidence, first reported from that facility in 1995, that neutrinos--the most elusive of common elementary particles--may have a small mass. Very difficult to detect because of their weak interaction with other particles of matter, neutrinos had been thought for decades to be entirely massless. Should they prove to have even a tiny mass, they could offer one possible solution to the problem of the "missing mass" of the universe--the idea, based on cosmological theory and observations of the gravitational behaviour of galaxies, that the universe contains much more mass than can be accounted for by adding up the masses of all of the observable objects. The ongoing debate over the age of the universe appeared to be approaching a consensus. The vital parameter defining the age is Hubble's constant (H0), which expresses the rate at which the universe is expanding. A high value for H0 implies a young universe, and vice versa. Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, Calif., used the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope to observe the apparent brightness of pulsating stars known as Cepheid variables in distant galaxies. Her result for H0 of 73+/-11 km per second per megaparsec implied an age of about 11 billion years. On the other hand, Allan Sandage of the same institution, studying the apparent brightness of supernovas in distant galaxies, reported a value of 57+/-4 km per second per megaparsec, which suggested an age of about 14 billion years. Although the two values nearly overlapped at the extremes of their error ranges, the age range that they encompassed presented difficulties. First, the oldest globular star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy appeared to be at least 12 billion years old and could be several billion years older. Second, galaxies with an apparent age almost as great as that of the universe were observed in 1996 by several groups. The presence of "old" stars and galaxies in a relatively "young" universe made it difficult for theorists to find the time needed for the universe to have formed galaxies and stars and for some of those objects to have become as old as they appeared to be. One eagerly anticipated experiment did not take place. The European Space Agency's Cluster mission, in which four artificial satellites were to be placed in stationary orbits relative to one another to give a three-dimensional picture of the solar wind and its effect on Earth, was destroyed by the explosion of its Ariane 5 launch vehicle. (DAVID G.C. JONES) This article updates Cosmos; electromagnetic radiation; quantum mechanics; physical science, principles of; physics; subatomic particle.