A new mosaic from ESA’s Mars Express shows off the Red Planet’s north polar ice cap and its distinctive dark spiralling troughs.
Chiara Mariotti, an Italian physicist with the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Turin, works on the CMS experiment at the LHC (Image: Sophia Bennett/CERN)
What place do women have in science? Have things really changed? To mark the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, female physicists, engineers and computer scientists at CERN share their own experiences of building a career in science, and their opinions on how women are treated and perceived in their discipline.
“When I was studying at university, one of our professors told us that women couldn’t make it as physicists. And she was a woman herself! She recently admitted to me that, thanks to successful female physicists like us, she’s changed her mind.”
Chiara Mariotti, a physicist in the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, has been working in experimental particle physics for 25 years. She has led numerous study groups, notably a prestigious group searching for the Higgs boson. She defended her thesis in the early 1990s in Italy, when particle physics was an almost exclusively male field.
“I felt that I had to work harder, make more effort to earn the same recognition as the men,” she recalls. “I put up with comments and suffered prejudice, but, in general, these things happened less once I worked with the people directly.”
“We have to explain to young people that science changes their daily life”
Chiara thinks that the field has changed for the better. “There are a lot more female physicists and physics students nowadays. I also hear fewer offensive comments among young people,” she stresses.
Nonetheless, the imbalance still needs to be addressed. Chiara often takes part in awareness-raising initiatives because she feels it’s increasingly necessary to explain the importance of scientific careers to young people.
“We have to show them that science is fascinating, that it opens up interesting career options. We also have to make them understand that science is essential for humanity, that it changes their daily life.”
An example of violence on a cosmic scale, enormous elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 lies about 75 million light-years away toward Fornax, the southern constellation of the Furnace. Investigating the startling sight, astronomers suspect the giant galaxy of colliding with smaller neighbor NGC 1317 seen just above, causing far flung loops and shells of stars. Light from their close encounter would have reached Earth some 100 million years ago. In the deep, sharp image, the central regions of NGC 1316 and NGC 1317 appear separated by over 100,000 light-years. Complex dust lanes visible within also indicate that NGC 1316 is itself the result of a merger of galaxies in the distant past. Found on the outskirts of the Fornax galaxy cluster, NGC 1316 is known as Fornax A. One of the visually brightest of the Fornax cluster galaxies it is one of the strongest and largest radio sources with radio emission extending well beyond this telescopic field-of-view, over several degrees on the sky.Researchers have developed a stable platform for manufacturing electronic devices made of graphene. Graphene field effect transistors (GFETs) made with this platform are shown to be stable against atmospheric influences and uniform in their properties across a batch of more than 500 devices.
Photo: Monolayer graphene on SiO2/Si wafer.
The adoption of graphene production at industrial scales is an imperative for the use of this multifunctional material in a variety of applications that have arisen in the past decade. Graphene’s superb electrical, optical, thermal, mechanical, and chemical properties are often demonstrated on a few micron-size samples in strictly controlled conditions, whereas the market demands reproducible operation of a multitude of devices in atmospheric conditions on a large scale. Now a team of researchers formed an industrial-academic partnership across France, Spain, and the UK to tackle this obstacle in a way that would lead to faster adoption of graphene technology in microelectronics.
In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters in the final weeks of 2016, researchers from GERAC, Thales, CNRS, the University of Cambridge and Graphenea reported on a statistical analysis and consistency of electrical performance of GFETs on a large scale. The devices were protected and passivated with two protective layers that ensured that the conductance minimum characteristic of electrical transport in graphene is visible most of the time and that it fluctuates very little from device to device. The intrinsic charge doping was below 5x1011 cm-2. In addition, this approach removed the hysteresis effect that usually degrades graphene device performance in air. Importantly, the devices were also stable in time, with unchanged performance over the course of one month.
Image: Passivated GFET performs better than unpassivated.
“We have consistently been working hard on developing platforms for integration of graphene in industrial scale processes. This work, a result of several projects of the European Commission, demonstrates that we have gone very far in this direction and that we can expect graphene microelectronic devices to start showing up in real products very soon”, says Amaia Zurutuza, the Scientific Director of Graphenea.
