Events

6 October 2009

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half to

Charles K. Kao
Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong

"for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"

and the other half jointly to

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

"for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor"

The masters of light

II-VI based magnetic semiconductors (MSs) with a direct and wide optical band gap are expected to show high potential for optical applications utilizing short wavelength laser diodes (LDs), such as 532-nm green and 475-nm blue LDs. II-VI MSs Zn1-xMnxTe and Zn1-xMnxSe exhibit their absorption edges at 428-544 nm and 428-458 nm, respectively. The edge is not so influenced by the Mn concentration, as is typically observed in Cd1-xMnxTe. We have confirmed that the Faraday rotation F in the ZnMnTe films deposited on quartz glass (QG) substrates is large near the absorption edge.

Two of the principal challenges in biomedical nanoscience and personalized medicine are: a) the detection of disease at the earliest possible time prior to its ability to cause damage (diagnostics and imaging) and b) delivering treatment at the right place, at the right time whilst minimizing unnecessary exposure (targeted therapy with a triggered release). The former is dominated by optical methods, emerging “life on a chip” systems and the versatile magnetic resonance imaging technology. The latter remains an ongoing challenge.

Electronic structure calculations for free and immersed
atoms are performed in the context of unrestricted Hartree-Fock
theory. Spherical symmetry is broken, lifting degeneracies in
electronic configurations involving the magnetic quantum number
m. Basis sets, produced from density functional theory,
are then explored for completeness. Comparison to spectroscopic
data is done by applying configurational interaction of the appropriate
L and S symmetry. Finally, a perturbation technique by
Lowdin is used to couple the bound atomic states to a