November 2006 Issue (A) SAIP announcements Miss Jaynie Padayachee : secretary@saip.org.za 1. Silver Jubilee Medal Nominations for 2007 You are invited to submit nominations for the Silver Jubilee Medal to be awarded in 2007. The deadline for nominations is: 16h00 on 28 February 2007. Nominations received after this time will not be considered.The award will be made for the outstanding achievement by a younger physicist in any of the following facets of any branch of physics: research, education, technology and industrial development. Awards will be made to persons who are less than 35 years old on the closing date for the receipt of nominations. All members are invited to nominate physicists for the award. The submission must consist of a full Curriculum Vitae of the nominee, accompanied by a full motivation that must clearly describe the fields of activity in physics in which the nominee has excelled, what her/his actual contributions were and the standards by which these contributions have been measured. Nominees must have been normally resident in South Africa up to the closing date set by Council for the receipt of nominations. Only work done by a SA citizen or someone with a permanent residence permit will be considered for this purpose. The work must have been done in South Africa or during a temporary visit abroad. Please contact the Secretary for further details. 2. Change to By-Law The Council proposes the following change to by-law 7.2. regarding the eligibility of physicists for the Silver Jubilee Medal. The current clause reads: "The award will be made for the outstanding achievement by a younger physicist in any of the following facets of any branch of physics: research, education, technology and industrial development. Awards will be made to persons who are less than 35 years old on the closing date for the receipt of nominations." The proposed change is: "The Silver Jubilee Medal is awarded for outstanding achievements by a younger physicist in any of the following facets of any branch of physics: research, education, technology and industrial development. Awards will be made to persons who are 35 years old PLUS UP TO 8 YEARS NOT SPENT IN ACTIVITIES IN PHYSICS on the closing date for the receipt of nominations." According to the constitution, for changing a by-law, unless objections are received from more than ten members within thirty days of the date of distribution of the additions or alterations, these additions or alterations shall become operative. Further, all such additions or alterations to the by-laws shall be submitted to the next General Meeting of the Institute following their becoming operative, for approval or amendment. Voting on such additions or alterations shall be by a show of hands unless a ballot. Please submit your objections to the above proposal before 15 December 2006. (B) NMMU, Physics Departmental News Dr Pearl Bernt : Pearl.Berndt@nmmu.ac.za (i) Prof Andrew Leitch appointed to Editorial Board of International Journal As of 1 September 2006, Prof Andrew Leitch (Dean of the Faculty of Science at NMMU) has been appointed to the editorial board of Physica Status Solidi (C). This "C" in the journal title represents "current topics" in Physics. The journal focuses on exciting new developments and rapidly evolving fields in Solid State Physics and materials science, and aims at disseminating the scientific results very quickly. More details about this journal are available at http://www.pss-c.com. Prof Leitch is the only South African on the editorial board of Physica Status Solidi. It is not the only international journal editorial board that he serves on. He has also been an editorial board member of the New Journal of Physics for a number of years. This distinguished appointment to the PSS (c) editorial board is indeed a great honour. Prof Andrew Leitch is to be congratulated on flying the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University flag so high on the international front. Contact: Prof Andrew Leitch (NMMU) : andrew.leitch@nmmu.ac.za (ii) Optics in Namibia Prof Japie Engelbrecht, of the NMMU Physics Department, recently participated, as an invited speaker, in the First Training College on Optics and Lasers. The Training College was hosted by the University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia from 4 - 8 September 2006. The Training College was attended by about 40 high school teachers, some undergraduate students in Science Education, and a few postgraduate students from South Africa. The College consisted of daily lectures on Geometrical Optics and Lasers, as well as practical sessions. Although Prof Engelbrecht was originally scheduled to only deliver invited talks on Lens Aberrations, he demonstrated his great team spirit, his enthusiasm for his subject, and his skill as an educator by helping the organizers of the College out of a very difficult predicament. When 3 of the invited speakers from Zimbabwe did not arrive to deliver their talks, Prof Engelbrecht valiantly stepped in to cover two additional lecture topics for which he had not specifically prepared. The many positive interactions with the teachers attending the First Training College on Optics and Lasers, as well as with members of the Department of Physics, University of Namibia, contributed towards a very rewarding experience for him. Prof Engelbrecht also delivered an entertaining and educational public talk entitled Voodoo Science as part of the National Science Week that was hosted at the university from 6-8 September 2006. The National Science week was officially opened by the Prime Minister of Namibia, clearly demonstrating the strong support shown by the Namibian Government. The audience addressed by Prof Engelbrecht included the Namibian Director of Research Science and Technology and the Senior Science and Technology Officer both of the Ministry of Education of Namibia. Contact: Prof Japie Engelbrecht (NMMU) : japie.engelbrecht@nmmu.ac.za (iii) Deputy Minister of Science & Technology visits NMMU Physics Dept The Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, Mr Derek Hanekom, visited the NMMU branch of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Strong Materials on Friday 21 September. The DST is very supportive of this initiative and will continue to fund this CoE until 2014. Prof Jan Neethling, of the NMMU Physics Department, is the head of the NMMU branch of the DST CoE, of which the lead institution is the University of the Witwatersrand. Prof Jan Neethling, Dr Pearl Berndt, and their students participate in four of the six focus areas of the CoE. These four areas include Ceramic Materials, Diamonds, Strong Metallic Alloys and Hard Metals. The NMMU CoE is the leading South African institution for the characterization of ultrahard materials using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and computer modeling of TEM images. The NMMU CoE also collaborates with Element Six, Mintek, Chalmers University in Sweden, and Sandvik Tooling in Stockholm, Sweden. During the recent visit to the NMMU Physics Department, the deputy minister and his delegation were alerted to the country's dire need for more sophisticated research equipment in order to keep South Africa competitive on the international research front. Prof Neethling skilfully interpreted the research objectives of the CoE in layman's terms for the benefit of the various media representatives, and engaged in some lively debate with Mr Hanekom on issues surrounding research in South Africa. As part of the presentation to the DST, three post-graduate students (who are also part of the CoE), Ms Gretta Hashe, Ms Tina Heiligers, and Mr Johan Westraadt, presented selected results from their projects on diamonds and other hard materials. Contact: Prof Jan Neethling (NMMU) : jan.neethling@nmmu.ac.za (iv) Rocket scientists in the making Each year, the NMMU Physics Department challenges the undergraduate students to "think outside the box" for their annual competition. The annual contest, organized by Prof Reinhardt Botha, is aimed at getting Physics students and staff together for an afternoon of fun and friendly competition. Physics is taken outside of the lecture room, and students are encouraged to try out their ideas in front of their peers and teachers. This year, the students were challenged to design a cold drink bottle rocket that would be capable of reaching a 4 meter diameter target some 60 meters away. Water was used to fuel these rockets, which were pressurized by compressed air to 4 atmospheres. A small, but very enthusiastic group of Physics students gathered early in October for SPRocket 2006. Mr Lucas Braden, a second year NMMU Physics student, eventually walked away with the main prize of R500 for coming within 5 meters of the target! In a second stage of the fun proceedings, the students were given one attempt each to see how far their rockets could travel. Mr Braden again walked away with the honours, with a winning distance of over 70 meters!! Contact: Prof Reinhardt Botha (NMMU) : Reinhardt.botha@nmmu.ac.za (C) HESS Discovery: Probing the Schwarzschild radius of the supermassive Black Hole in M87 Okkie de Jager : FSKocdj@puknet.puk.ac.za As the world's most powerful gamma-ray telescope, the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), consisting of four 12 meter telescopes in Namibia, had a good chance to record the fastest timescale (1 to 2 days) of variability ever seen from the active galaxy M87. At a distance of 16 Mpc in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, M87 (a Fanaroff-Riley I type galaxy) is relatively close to our own galaxy compared to other active galaxies in the Universe. Normally fast variability is seen as a result of Doppler boosting, when looking straight into the jets of active galactic nuclei. However, in the case of M87, this jet is tilted, so that we are not favoured by such Doppler effects to create an accelerated variability. Only the 3,000 million solar mass black hole at the centre of M87 appears to be small enough to account for this fast variability, since it would take light just less than half a day to cross the Schwarzschild radius (i.e. twice the radius of the orbit of Neptune, the outermost planet of our solar system). Light from within the Schwarzschild radius cannot escape from the black hole, but we must be seeing gamma-ray production not too far outside this critical radius, given that the variability timescale is already less than 2 days. In fact, since we are no longer seeing classical gamma-ray production from shock accelerated particles in the jet, we may be witnessing for the first time an electrodynamic accelerator, generating voltages of more than 100 milllion times million volt. Are we observing an accretion disk/black hole dynamo electric field or a General Relativistic frame dragged electric field, or something else? See Science Express of 26 October 2006 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1134408v1 See also the H.E.S.S. Source of the month (with images of M87) at http://www.mpihd.mpg.de/hfm/HESS/public/som/current.htm ( D ) Conference announcements (i) SAASTEC Conference Mr Derek Fish : thefish@iafrica.com The 9th annual conference of the Southern African Association of Science and Technology Centres will take place from 29 Nov to 1 Dec at Unizul Science Centre in Richards Bay, KwaZulu-Natal. Registration forms and further details can be downloaded from www.saastec.co.za Or contact Derek Fish on 0824528566 for more information. (ii) A series of Synchrotron meetings to be held at iThemba LABS Dr Simon Connell : connell@psi.phys.wits.ac.za WHAT IS A SYNCHROTRON? Synchrotron radiation sources, can be compared to "supermicroscopes", capable of resolving the structure of matter down to the level of atoms and molecules to reveal invaluable information in numerous fields of research . There are about 50 synchrotrons in the world being used by an ever growing number of scientists. IN MORE DETAIL Synchrotrons are novel research tools which offer massively enhanced sub-micron resolution in high sensitivity analysis and quantitative 2D/3D imaging capacity. The aspects of a sample that this applies are * density morphology, * crystalline structure, including defects and residual strain * molecular structure including full chemical and geometrical info * magnetic properties * particular surface and nano science capacity but also up to macro sizes (eg human body) HOW CAN I BENEFIT ? There is a program to facilitate the beneficiation of research opportunities for South African Scientists and Students at Synchrotrons. This is both by access to funding and assistance with linkages to collaborations with synchrotron scientists. There is a special plan to assist students get involved ........ READ ON ! THE SYNCHROTRON SCHOOL AND WORKSHOPS A Series of Four meetings focusing on Science at Synchrotrons is being held at the iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Sciences, from Monday 5th February to Saturday 10th February 2007. Student participation is fully funded. The program includes * A three day School for Synchrotron Techniques in Research (aimed at students and those new to Synchrotron Science), * A one day set of Thematic Workshops spread into three parallel sessions (aimed at established researchers for exploring new possibilities) * A one day Research Workshop (along the lines of a "Gordon" conference for advanced and novel topics) * A one day Strategic Planning Workshop (developing a roadmap for Synchrotron Science in South Africa) IS THERE FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR ME TO ATTEND ? Yes ... if you are an enthusiastic interested student, contact us to find out if we can assist you. For more information contact : synchrotrons@tlabs.ac.za , http://www.synchrotrons.tlabs.ac.za ( E ) Conference Report Trevor Derry : derryT@physics.wits.ac.za In September Trevor attended the 15th International Conference on the Ion Beam Modification of Materials in Sicily; Prof. Mike Hayes of UP was also there. He is hoping that this brief summary of the latest work will stimulate ideas for proposals and collaborations revolving around the newly refurbished ion implantation facilities of iThemba LABS (Gauteng).The theme of Nanoscience was very predominant. In this context, ion beam processing has come to be regarded as quite routine. This includes a resurgence of interest in the production of self-organized patterns of dots and ripples on semiconductor surfaces by heavy-ion sputtering -- still something of a solution looking for a problem though. More likely to find applications (in optoelectronics or computing), is the easy production of buried colloidal nanoparticles by the implantation of metal ions into glasses or ceramics. Worth noting that iTLa(G)'s predecessor had an active collaboration with Unizul in this area. Further irradiation with Tandem energy ions can cause these particles to elongate and coalesce into metal wires parallel to the beam direction, an electronic-stopping effect. Focused Ion Beams are becoming common, and their intense sputtering can be used not only to slice out electron microscope specimens in-situ, but also to sculpt a most amazing variety of 3-D structures for nanotechnology applications. (The Wits EM unit is to host a shared FIB facility which should be delivered soon). Nanotubes and fullerenes are not forgotten; and there is still semiconductor work being reported (e.g. aspects of B+ doping of Si), but with wide bandgap materials more to the fore; and photonic or optoelectronic work continues, often based on Er+ implantation. Ion channelling analysis is used routinely everywhere (available, of course, on the iTLa(G) accelerators). The use of ion implantation in the biomedical field was once a curiosity, but is entering the mainstream now, at a time when iTLa(G) is considering biomedical collaborations. Reported applications include the reduction of Ni leaching from stent materials (by ion plasma immersion), the rendering of surgical polymers bacteriacidal using Ag+, and the treatment of glaucoma using radioactive implants produced by implantation! The conference programme is on the website at http://ibmm.imm.cnr.it/index.asp?cont=program