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8 The Impact of Condensed-Matter and Materials Physics Research
Pages 144-164

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From page 144...
... economic security and are most dramatically reflected in the current crisis in primary and secondary school science education. The CMMP community must now extend educational efforts not only to improve general scientific literacy but also to 144
From page 145...
... Along with the six scientific challenges for CMMP that are identified in this report, the challenge to educate the next generation of scientists and citizens is equally important. In further refinement of this challenge, the Committee on CMMP 2010 identified three key issues: how to educate the next generation of CMMP researchers, how to attract talented people to the field, and how to increase the scientific literacy of the general public and of school-age children.
From page 146...
... At the same time, the general public is largely unaware that CMMP is the science behind many of the technological marvels that they take for granted. Introducing interest ing CMMP phenomena at all levels of science teaching, from "gee-whiz" talks in the local public library to science classes in elementary school and the undergradu ate lecture hall, is an opportunity that the CMMP community should not miss.
From page 147...
... Nonetheless, the present system, in which the quality of outreach programs is a criterion for the evaluation of scientific research grants, confuses two conceptually distinct goals to the point that neither is optimally served. The Committee on CMMP 2010 therefore concluded that outreach, K-12 education, and undergraduate science education initiatives should be supported by supplemental or stand-alone grants administered by separate National Science Foundation (NSF)
From page 148...
... However, there is no question that physics research, and especially CMMP research, has had a major impact on almost every aspect of life today. Examples range from the invention of the transistor/integrated circuit and the laser to their application in personal computers and supercomputers and the instrumentation that is used to diagnose and treat disease -- for example, computer-aided tomog raphy, positron emission tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging.
From page 149...
... Available at http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2003/CR-2003-212618.pdf; last accessed September 17, 2007.  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I Report, The Physical Science Basis, 2007.
From page 150...
... The CMMP community cannot solve the political and economic issues that surround the energy challenge, but it can aspire to creating technological break throughs that will provide lawmakers with more options. For example, progress in the area of CO2 sequestration could substantially reduce the environmental impact of using coal for power generation, and the development of closed-loop nuclear fuel cycles could mitigate concerns about nuclear waste disposal.10 Improvements in the efficiency of solar cells may make the price of solar energy competitive with that of energy from fossil fuels, and success in the areas of hydrogen generation and storage could make the hydrogen economy a reality.
From page 151...
... Indeed, two of the examples listed in the preceding paragraph as recent advances demonstrate that nanotechnology has already arrived in clinical medicine. Today, there are journals with "Nanomedicine" in their titles, and a look at such journals as well as more established publications shows the huge scope of activity, on themes ranging from the targeting of tumors by functionalized nanoparticles to single (or few)
From page 152...
... First, CMMP technologies, such as materials and devices ranging from nonlinear or ganic materials to charge-coupled-device detectors, are ubiquitous in laboratories throughout the scientific enterprise. Second, as science expands and the disciplin ary boundaries blur, concepts originating in CMMP -- for example, fermion pairing or the statistical mechanics of biological molecules (Chapter 4)
From page 153...
... Ultrafast laser technology, with pulse durations in the femtosecond regime, can reveal critical information about charge carrier dynamics, such as relaxation processes, needed for the characterization of semiconductor materials for the potential application of these materials in devices. Femtosecond pulses are also used in time-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to determine surface states and relaxation processes in solids, and they can be used to study structural phase transitions in real time.
From page 154...
... The BEC-BCS crossover in paired fermions is a concept going back more than 25 years in the CMMP community, where it was first realized that there is an intimate connection between BCS pairing, the underlying mechanism of supercon ductivity and superfluidity in 3He, and Bose-Einstein condensation of composite bosons that are created by binding two fermions. Although apparently quite dif ferent, the BEC and BCS regimes are just the extreme limits of a continuum.
From page 155...
... One can envision that systems of ultracold atoms, acting as highly tunable quantum simulators, can resolve this and other similarly vexing issues in CMMP in the near future. These growing connections between CMMP and AMO physics have blurred the boundaries where these two fields intersect.
From page 156...
... The discovery of the BCS theory of superconductivity had an immediate im pact on nuclear physics: Cooper pairing of neutrons and of protons explained many features of the single-particle excitation levels, as well as the larger-than-expected spacing of the energies of states of rotating nuclei in terms of a reduced moment of inertia -- the analog of the Meissner effect in superconductors. In neutron stars -- in essence, giant nuclei with masses somewhat greater than that of the Sun, and the driving engines of pulsars and related high-energy astro physical phenomena -- the neutron liquid is expected to be superfluid, and the proton liquid, superconducting.
From page 157...
... Similarly, studies of neutron matter have led to new insights into the behavior of strongly coupled atomic clouds, and into the general properties of superfluid Fermi gases. Current areas of study include questions about the similarity of the transition between Bose-Einstein condensation and BCS pairing in condensed matter and the deconfinement transition of dense hadronic matter; the observed low viscosity of strongly interacting quark-gluon plasmas and condensed atomic clouds; and BCS pairing of imbalanced Fermi seas in superconductors, trapped fermionic atomic clouds, and quark-gluon plasmas.
From page 158...
... In this way a detector array can be made, and each "pixel" can be rapidly addressed via a simple frequency multiplexing scheme. In addition, kinetic inductance detec tors are sensitive over an extremely broad energy band, from the very low ener gies characteristic of the cosmic microwave background to the very high energies encountered in x-ray astronomy.
From page 159...
... only gradually developed into one of the most powerful characterization tools in organic chemistry, polymer science, and molecular biology, but finally led to several Nobel Prizes in chemistry (e.g., 1991, 2002) , as well as the 2003 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
From page 160...
... Physics and chemistry will continue to be inextricably linked, and many excit ing future discoveries in the CMMP area will be found at the interface between these two important fields. It is essential that this interface be nurtured by bring ing chemists and physicists together at interdisciplinary research centers such as the NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers and the Department of Energy Nanoscale Science Research Centers.
From page 161...
... Thus, the biologists' dream of a complete catalog of biomolecular structures is being enabled by the technology generated in the CMMP community. For the CMMP community, some of the most striking aspects of magnetic resonance involve relaxation processes: how spins exchange energy with each other and with their surroundings, and how these interactions build a bridge between the coherent quantum dynamics of isolated spins and the dissipative behavior of macroscopic samples as they come to thermal equilibrium.
From page 162...
... The Metropolis algorithm and Monte Carlo methods, which compute properties by the judicious sampling of possibly favorable configurations, were first used in nuclear physics and further developed in condensed-matter physics. They were the first of a broad class of methods than can be used to find approximate but very accurate solutions to difficult search problems.
From page 163...
... Finally, it has become clear in recent years that the theory of the transmission and processing of intact quantum states represents a profound extension of the classical theories of information and computation, significantly altering the assessment of the kind and quantity of physical resources needed to solve various computational problems. The developing theory already has some applications to cryptography, and, if general-purpose quantum computers can be built, a large class of optimization problems will be solvable in a time proportional to the square root of the time presently required.
From page 164...
... The CMMP community should organize sessions at national meetings to engage funding agencies and the community in a dialogue on best practices for proposal review and for the support of nontraditional, rapidly evolving areas. Recommendation:  Outreach, K-12, and undergraduate science education initiatives should be supported through supplemental or stand-alone grants administered by separate National Science Foundation and Department of Education programs, instead of through individual research grant awards.


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