Bulletin On Mini Black Holes: existence, artificiality and reality

• Laser light creates black holes in the lab: As it is hard to experimentally observe what happens to the light’s wavelength, when it approaches a black hole’s horizon, Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews, UK, and his colleagues seem to have found an alternative route. By firing two laser beams along an optical fiber, first the slower one and then the faster one (the speed depends on the wavelength), the faster light beam tries chases the first bundle of light. When the fast light beam reaches the slower one, it dramatically drops its speed in order to take the lead; however, if the speed difference is large, then the faster light beam becomes trapped by means of the slower bundle — an effect that is intuitively similar to what happens to the light beam at a black hole’s horizon. The team was able to measure the light’s shift patters, which closely correspond to those predicted by cosmologist at event horizons. [full article here].
• Black Holes at the LHC: I found this article by P. Kanti to be quite informative and relatively easy to follow. It is an nice overall outlook at the black-hole creation at the LHC.
• As CERN will make an attempt at observing — or disproving the existence of — mini black holes, which is one of the consequences of — and hence one of the ways to prove or disprove — the superstring theory, here appeared another absolutely pointless, inconstructive, inconclusive, badly written, and subtly and deliberately offensive article, aimed at “string theory is wrong, get over it…”.

Physics World’s Best of Two Thousand and Seven

The well renown magazine Physics World (~) published an article in their online news section a week ago, entitled “The Best of 2007″ [note: in order to be a little different, I spelled out "2007" ;)]

In it (which can be found here), they list the most interesting articles that appeared in the Physics World magazine in 2007. The intro is a very good summary of the year, so I thought I’d copy it here too:

It was the year that the first “commercial” quantum computer was unveiled, and 2007 also saw a flurry of research into the supersolid state of matter. Astronomers improved our understanding of the cosmos by zeroing in on the origins of ultra-high energy cosmic rays and providing the best-ever map of dark matter in the Universe. While the Nobel Prize in Physics – awarded for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance — demonstrated how investing in fundamental research could lead to rapid improvements in technology, the year ended on a sour note with some physicists in the US and UK facing significant cuts in their research funding.

The financial cut is indeed a very sad instance of this past year (more here).

To the list, I would also, however, add the ruling out of PVLAS axion, which, I think, was also quite important.