There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Recent years have witnessed many breakthroughs in research on graphene (the first two-dimensional atomic crystal) as well as a significant advance in the mass production of this material. This one-atom-thick fabric of carbon uniquely combines extreme mechanical strength, exceptionally high electronic and thermal conductivities, impermeability to gases, as well as many other supreme properties, all of which make it highly attractive for numerous applications. Here we review recent progress in graphene research and in the development of production methods, and critically analyse the feasibility of various graphene applications.

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A roadmap for graphene

QUANTUM gravitational effects are usually ignored in calculations of the formation and evolution of black holes. The justification for this is that the radius of curvature of space-time outside the event horizon is very large compared to the Planck length (Għ/c3)1/2 ≈ 10−33 cm, the length scale on which quantum fluctuations of the metric are expected to be of order unity. This means that the energy density of particles created by the gravitational field is small compared to the space-time curvature. Even though quantum effects may be small locally, they may still, however, add up to produce a significant effect over the lifetime of the Universe ≈ 1017 s which is very long compared to the Planck time ≈ 10−43 s. The purpose of this letter is to show that this indeed may be the case: it seems that any black hole will create and emit particles such as neutrinos or photons at just the rate that one would expect if the black hole was a body with a temperature of (κ/2π) (ħ/2k) ≈ 10−6 (M/M)K where κ is the surface gravity of the black hole1. As a black hole emits this thermal radiation one would expect it to lose mass. This in turn would increase the surface gravity and so increase the rate of emission. The black hole would therefore have a finite life of the order of 1071 (M/M)−3 s. For a black hole of solar mass this is much longer than the age of the Universe. There might, however, be much smaller black holes which were formed by fluctuations in the early Universe2. Any such black hole of mass less than 1015 g would have evaporated by now. Near the end of its life the rate of emission would be very high and about 1030 erg would be released in the last 0.1 s. This is a fairly small explosion by astronomical standards but it is equivalent to about 1 million 1 Mton hydrogen bombs. It is often said that nothing can escape from a black hole. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking realized that, owing to quantum effects, black holes should emit particles with a thermal distribution of energies — as if the black hole had a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. In addition to putting black-hole thermodynamics on a firmer footing, this discovery led Hawking to postulate 'black hole explosions', as primordial black holes end their lives in an accelerating release of energy.

Black Hole Explosions

Terahertz spectroscopy systems use far-infrared radiation to extract molecular spectral information in an otherwise inaccessible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Materials research is an essential component of modern terahertz systems: novel, higher-power terahertz sources rely heavily on new materials such as quantum cascade structures. At the same time, terahertz spectroscopy and imaging provide a powerful tool for the characterization of a broad range of materials, including semiconductors and biomolecules.

Materials for terahertz science and technology

Using picopulses generated by a mode-locked ruby laser, we have measured the 3-8-A bandwidth of a hole burned in the 0-0 transition of cryptocyanine in methanol and demonstrated the inhomogeneous chatacter of this transition. The population-rate equations are written for an inhomogeneous transition with two and four energy levels interacting with continuous or pulsed excitation. Using the numerical solutions of this model together with the experimental result we determine a transverse relaxation time T_{2} = 0.6-1 ps for cryptocyanine in methanol.

Spectral hole burning in dye solutions

An original method for retrieving the Kerr nonlinear index was proposed and implemented for TF12 heavy flint glass. Then, a defocusing lens made of this highly nonlinear glass was used to generate an almost constant spectral broadening across a Gaussian beam profile. The lens was designed with spherical curvatures chosen in order to match the laser beam profile, such that the product of the thickness with intensity is constant. This solid-state optics in combination with chirped mirrors was used to decrease the pulse duration at the output of a terawatt-class femtosecond laser. We demonstrated compression of a 33 fs pulse to 16 fs with 170 mJ energy.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1612-2011/13/7/075401/pdf

High energy femtosecond pulse compression

Plasmas can serve as damage-less optics for amplifying and focusing light pulses to very high intensity. This provides a way to overcome the limitations of solid-state optical materials as a damage threshold in the classical sense is absent. The amplification process relies on parametric processes in plasmas exploiting the coupling of transverse electromagnetic waves to a longitudinal plasma wave. The plasma response can either be an electron plasma wave (stimulated Raman scattering), an ion-acoustic wave (stimulated Brillouin scattering) or a more complicated non-resonant feature in the case of very short pulses.

Plasma-based creation of short light pulses: analysis and simulation of amplification and focusing

Ytterbium-doped glass regenerative chirped-pulse amplifier

Isolated attosecond pulses and electron bunches can be efficiently generated in the interaction of intense lasers with plasma in the confined volume of the λ3 regime. Scaling with intensity is found to improve pulse brevity and focusability greatly while the efficiency of the attosecond pulse generation continues to remain high. Practical consideration of the tools needed to generate such pulses indicates that such interactions are surprisingly accessible. We mention some introductory experiments whereby we may verify the theoretical predictions of this new class of attosecond pulses. This technique may enable us to reach the Schwinger intensity 1029 W cm−2.

Gerard Mourou

Papers

Spectral hole burning in dye solutions

High energy femtosecond pulse compression

Plasma-based creation of short light pulses: analysis and simulation of amplification and focusing

Ytterbium-doped glass regenerative chirped-pulse amplifier

Relativistic generation of isolated attosecond pulses: a different route to extreme intensity