What physicists do in the lab part II: Nobel Prize!

Tomorrow the nobel prize in physics will be announced! But what for? To show that physicists do not (always) only live in their ivory tower of bubbly dreams I shortly summarised what I remember about the three most promising candidates for the nobel prize in physics 2013 do/did. (Most promising according to thomsonreuters.)

 

Hideo Hosono - Iron-based superconductors

Superconductor floating over a
permanent magnet.
(wikipedia)

Short story for this one: Supraconductive means that a material loses all its electrical resitivity. This is pretty cool because often you do not like resistivity. It costs energy. So everybody is happy when the resistivity is low. (At least in some applications.) For a long time low temperature was required to reach superconductivity. Then someone found somethin about copper-based superconductors at "high" temperatures where high means several Kelvin. (Around  50 - 70 I think - was a nobel prize in 198something as far as I remeber.) Now someone (Hideo Hosono) found something iron-based. Next nobel prize? ;)

Galaxy M51. ((c) MPIA Heidelberg)

Geoffrey W. Marc, Michel Mayor, Didier Queloz - Exoplanets

What do astrophysicists do? Yeees, look for aliens! ;) A very fascinating question not only to physicists is the one if we are alone in the universe ... Philosophers may wonder, religious people may beleive, physicists go looking for it. First step: Find planets outside our solar system. The three guys named above did exactly that. I am not an astrophysicist but I think they managed to do so by examining the planets' bending of light of stars. Pretty cool, huh? ;)

François Englert and Peter W. Higgs - The Higgs Boson

ATLAS detector. ((c) KIP Uni Heidelberg)

Maybe some of you have already heard of this mysterious particle - the "God particle". It is so important to physicists that they have been looking for it since the 1960s when its existance was predicted for the first time. But how can one predict the existance of a particle? Well, most of our modern physics is based on the so called standard model which explains the four fundamental forces (gravitaional, electromagnetical, strong and weak force) with the interaction of different particles. The latter three are quite well explained in this model, only for gravitation there was no corresponding particle. But there should have been one according to the standard model. Thus, physicists tried to find it in order to confirm the correctness of their beloved model. (If they never found/find it they might have to assume that the standard model is wrong - horrible vision!) In March 2013 now some physicists may have found it at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Genf. This discovery might be worth a nobel prize because the standard model and hence the current understanding of physics would have been proven right. (To a certain degree ...)

The procedure of winning a nobel prize can be found here by the way. :)