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02/19/2005

Revolutionary Grassroots Astrophysics Project "Einstein@Home" Goes Live

A new, grassroots computing project dubbed Einstein@Home, which will let anyone with a personal computer contribute to cutting-edge astrophysics research, is being officially announced today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). California Institute of Technology physics professor Barry Barish will make the announcement during a press briefing at 11 a.m.

02/17/2005

New light-emitting device could eliminate the bottleneck that slows down electrical circuits

Robert Tindol

Applied physicists at the California Institute of Technology have invented a light-emitting transistor that could potentially bypass a major bottleneck that slows down electronic circuitry. The new device could pave the way for on-chip optical interconnections that would enable the marriage of two great modern technologies--communications based on the transmission of photons, and computing with silicon-based devices that are driven by electric currents. A successful optical interconnection technology would allow information to move around inside a silicon chip at the speed of light while creating substantially less heat, leading to dramatically faster computers.

02/02/2005

Caltech Receives $2.5 Million to Further Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy

Deborah Williams-Hedges

The California Institute of Technology announces a $2.5 million award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to support the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA).

02/01/2005

Hard X-Ray telescope up for final NASA review; project will be led by Caltech's Fiona Harrison

If all goes well with a technical study approved by NASA for this year, an innovative telescope should be orbiting Earth by the end of the decade and taking the first focused high-energy X-ray pictures of matter falling into black holes and shooting out of exploding stars. Not only will the telescope be 1,000 times more capable of finding new black holes than anything previously launched into space, but it will also give us an unprecedented look at the origins of the heavy elements we're all made of.

01/21/2005

SPIDER Experiment Touches Down in Antarctica

Kimm Fesenmaier

After spending 16 days suspended from a giant helium balloon floating 115,000 feet above Antarctica, a scientific instrument dubbed SPIDER has landed in a remote region of the frozen continent.

SPIDER and its balloon in the distance; snow in the foreground

12/21/2004

More Stormy Weather on Titan

Jill Perry

Titan, it turns out, may be a very stormy place. In 2001, a group of astronomers led by Henry Roe, now a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, discovered methane clouds near the south pole of Saturn's largest moon, resolving a debate about whether such clouds exist amid the haze of its atmosphere.

12/09/2004

Physicists at Caltech, UT Austin ReportBose-Einstein Condensation of Cold Excitons

Robert Tindol

Bose-Einstein condensates are enigmatic states of matter in which huge numbers of particles occupy the same quantum state and, for all intents and purposes, lose their individual identity. Predicted long ago by Albert Einstein and Satyendranath Bose, these bizarre condensates have recently become one of the hottest topics in physics research worldwide.

11/24/2004

Internet Speed Quadrupled by International Team During 2004 Bandwidth Challenge

For the second consecutive year, the "High Energy Physics" team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers have won the Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge with a sustained data transfer of 101 gigabits per second (Gbps) between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. This is more than four times faster than last year's record of 23.2 gigabits per second, which was set by the same team.

11/22/2004

New Home for Astronomers

For almost 100 years, Caltech has been at the forefront of astronomy and astrophysics, pioneering research that has led to greater understanding of the earth, the solar system, and the Universe. Now the Institute is about to help its world-renowned astronomers and other investigators continue their groundbreaking discoveries well into the 21st century.

11/10/2004

Moore Foundation Gives $25.4 million to Caltech for Nanoscale Systems Initiative

Robert Tindol

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded a $25.4 million grant to the California Institute of Technology to establish the Nanoscale Systems Initiative (NSI). The grant will support one of the scientific and technological community's promising research avenues--the creation of extremely tiny devices to augment and in some cases displace the state-of-the-art electronic systems of today.

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