Mathematics and Physical Sciences: Year In Review 1998


Major mathematical news in 1998 included the claim that a nearly 400-year-old conjecture finally had been proved. In 1611 the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler concluded that the manner in which grocers commonly stack oranges--in a square-based pyramid with each layer of oranges sitting in a square grid centred above the holes in the layer below--gives the densest way to pack spheres in infinite space. (Packing with oranges in each layer in a hexagonal grid is equally dense.) Thomas Hales of the University of Michigan, after 10 years of work, announced a proof of the conjecture. Nearly every aspect of the proof relied on computer support and verification, and supporting the 250-page written proof were three gigabytes of computer files. Mathematicians would need time to determine if the proof was complete and correct.

Kepler was set on the sphere-packing problem by correspondence with Thomas Harriot, an English mathematician and astronomer and an assistant to Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh wanted a quick way to determine the number of cannonballs in a pile with a base of any shape. Harriot prepared tables for Raleigh and wrote to Kepler about the problem in connection with their discussion of atomism. In 1831 the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss showed that face-centred cubic packing, as the orange packing is known to mathematicians, could not be less dense than other lattice packings, those in which the centres of the spheres lie on a regular grid. Some nonlattice packings, however, are almost as efficient, and in some higher dimensions the densest packings known are nonlattice packings. It was thus possible that a denser nonlattice packing might exist for three dimensions.

Hales’s work built on that of the Hungarian mathematician Laszlo Fejes-Toth, who in 1953 reduced the task of settling the conjecture to that of solving an enormous calculation. Hales formulated an equation in 150 variables that described every conceivable regular arrangement of spheres. This equation derived from a mathematical decomposition of the star-shaped spaces (decomposition stars) between the spheres. Hales had a computer classify the decomposition stars into 5,000 different types. Although each type required the solving of a separate optimization problem, linear programming methods allowed the 5,000 to be reduced to fewer than 100, which were then done individually by computer. The proof involved the solving of more than 100,000 linear programming problems that each included 100-200 variables and 1,000-2,000 constraints.

The analogue of the Kepler problem in two dimensions is the task of packing circular disks of equal radius as densely as possible. The hexagonal arrangement in which each disk is surrounded by six others--a lattice packing--was shown by Gauss to be the densest packing. For dimensions higher than three, it was not known if the densest lattice packings are the densest packings.

The mathematics of sphere packing is directly related to issues of reliable data transmission, including data compression and error-correcting codes, in such applications as product bar coding, signals from spacecraft, and music encoded on compact discs. Code words can be considered to correspond to points in a space whose dimension is the common length of a code word. The "Hamming distance" (named for pioneer coding theorist Richard Hamming) between any two given words, which can be code words or words to which they can become distorted by errors in transmission, is the number of positions in which the words differ. Around each code-word point, a sphere of radius r includes all words that differ in at most r places from the code word; these words are the distortions of the code word that would be corrected to the code word by the error-correcting process. The error-detecting and error-correcting capabilities of a code depend on how large r can be without spheres of different code words becoming overlapped; in the case of an overlap, one would know that an error had occurred but not to which code word to correct it.

An analogy is the task of packing into a box of fixed size a fixed number of same-size glass ornaments (the total number of code words) wrapped in padding, with the requirement that each ornament be padded as thickly as possible. This, in turn, means that the padded ornaments must be packed as closely as possible. Thus, efficient codes and dense packings of spheres (the padded ornaments) go hand in hand. The longer the code words are, the greater is the dimension of the space and the farther apart code words can be, which makes for greater error-detection and error-correction capability. Longer code words, however, are less efficient to transmit. A longer code word corresponds to using a bigger box to ship the same number of ornaments.

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It remained to be seen whether Hales’s result or the methods he used would lead to advances in coding theory. Mathematicians generally were skeptical of the value of proofs that relied heavily on computer verification of individual cases without offering new insights into the surrounding mathematical landscape. Nevertheless, Hales’s proof, if recognized as correct, could inspire renewed efforts toward a simpler and more insightful proof.


Physical Chemistry

Hydrogen is the lightest, simplest, and most plentiful chemical element. Under ordinary conditions it behaves as an electrical insulator. Theory predicts that hydrogen will undergo a transition to a metal with superconducting properties if it is subjected to extreme pressures. Until 1998, attempts to create metallic hydrogen in the laboratory had failed. Those efforts included experiments making use of diamond anvil cells that compressed hydrogen to 340 GPa (gigapascals) at room temperature, about 3.4 million times atmospheric pressure. Some theorists predicted that such pressures, which approach those at Earth’s centre, should be high enough for the insulator-metal transition to occur.

Robert C. Cauble and associates of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif., and the University of British Columbia reported the first experimental evidence for the long-awaited transition. They used a powerful laser beam to compress a sample of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, to 300 GPa. The laser simultaneously heated the deuterium to 40,000 K (about 70,000° F). In the experiments the sample began to show signs of becoming a metal at pressures as low as 50 GPa, as indicated by increases in its compressibility and reflectivity. Both characteristics are directly related to a substance’s electrical conductivity. Cauble’s group chose deuterium because it is easier to compress than hydrogen, but they expected that hydrogen would behave in the same way. Confirmation of the theory would do more than provide new insights into the fundamental nature of matter. It would lend support to an idea, proposed by astronomers, that giant gas planets like Saturn and Jupiter have cores composed of metallic hydrogen created under tremendous pressure.

Chemists long had sought methods for glimpsing the intermediate products that form and disappear in a split second as ultrafast chemical reactions proceed. These elusive reaction intermediates can provide important insights for making reactions proceed in a more direct, efficient, or productive fashion. A. Welford Castleman, Jr., and associates of Pennsylvania State University reported development of a new method to "freeze" chemical reactions on a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second) time scale. Their technique involved use of a phenomenon termed a Coulomb explosion to arrest a reaction and detect intermediates. A Coulomb explosion occurs when a particle, such as a molecule, has acquired many positive or negative electric charges. The like charges produce tremendous repulsive forces that tear the particle apart. A Coulomb explosion that occurs during a chemical reaction instantly halts the reaction. Fragments left behind provide direct evidence of the intermediates that existed in the split second before the explosion.

Castleman’s group used a pulse from a powerful laser to ionize particles, and so trigger a Coulomb explosion, in a reaction involving the dimer of 7-azaindole. (A dimer is a molecule formed of two identical simpler molecules, called monomers.) When the dimer is excited by light energy, protons (hydrogen ions) transfer from one monomer to another in the system, allowing two dimers to combine into a four-monomer molecule, or tautomer. The explosion froze this reaction, which allowed Castleman’s group to determine exactly how the proton transfer occurs.

In the 1980s physicists developed laser and magnetic techniques for trapping individual atoms at ultracold temperatures, which allowed their properties to be studied in detail never before possible. At room temperature the atoms and molecules in air move at speeds of about 4,000 km/h (2,500 mph), which makes observation difficult. Intense chilling, however, slows atomic and molecular motion enough for detailed study. Specially directed laser pulses reduce the motion of atoms, sapping their energy and creating a cooling effect. The slowed atoms then are confined in a magnetic field. Chemists have wondered for years whether laser cooling techniques could be extended to molecules and thus provide an opportunity to trap and study molecular characteristics in greater detail.

John M. Doyle and associates at Harvard University reported a new procedure for confining atoms and molecules without laser cooling. In their experiments the researchers focused a laser on solid calcium hydride, liberating calcium monohydride molecules. They chilled the molecules with cryogenically cooled helium, reducing their molecular motion, and then confined the molecules in a magnetic trap. The technique could have important implications for chemical science, leading to new insights into molecular interactions and other processes.

Inorganic Chemistry

Gold is somewhat unusual among its neighbours in the periodic table of elements. Whereas the transition metals platinum and palladium, for instance, have become important industrial catalysts, gold has long been regarded to be much less active catalytically. In the past few years, however, researchers reported that gold has extraordinarily high catalytic activity when dispersed as extremely fine particles on supports such as titanium dioxide. In that form gold is active in such processes as low-temperature catalytic combustion, partial oxidation of hydrocarbons, hydrogenation of unsaturated hydrocarbons, and reduction of nitrogen oxides.

During the year D.W. Goodman and associates at Texas A & M University at College Station reported a much-anticipated explanation for this unusual behaviour. They used scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy and other techniques to study small clusters of gold atoms supported on a titanium dioxide surface. Gold’s catalytic activity was found to be related to thickness of the layers, with maximum activity for clusters consisting of about 300 atoms. The findings suggested that supported clusters of metal atoms, in general, may have unusual catalytic properties as cluster size becomes smaller.

In past research Mika Pettersson and associates of the University of Helsinki, Fin., had synthesized a number of unusual compounds consisting of an atom of the rare gas xenon (Xe) or krypton (Kr), a hydrogen atom, and an atom or chemical group possessing enough affinity for electrons to allow it to bond with the rare-gas atom. The compounds included HXeH, HXeCl, HXeBr, HXeI, HXeCN, HXeNC, HKrCl, and HKrCN. During the year the chemists added to this list with their report of the synthesis of the first known compound containing a bond between xenon and sulfur (S). The compound, HXeSH, was produced during the low-temperature dissociation of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) in a xenon matrix with ultraviolet light at specific wavelengths.

Organic and Applied Chemistry

Chemists have synthesized a wide variety of fullerene molecules since 1990, when the soccer-ball-shaped, 60-carbon molecule buckminsterfullerene (C60), the first member of this new family of carbon molecules, was produced in large quantities. All of the fullerene molecules structurally characterized during the period, however, have had a minimum of 60 carbon atoms. Some chemists argued that C60 was the smallest fullerene stable enough to be synthesized in bulk quantities. During the year Alex Zettl and colleagues of the University of California, Berkeley, overturned that notion with the synthesis of the "minifullerene" C36. They used the arc-discharge method, in which an electric arc across two graphite electrodes produces large quantities of fullerenes. The bonding in C36, like that in C60, comprises three-dimensional arrangements of hexagons and pentagons, with the minimum possible number of shared pentagon-pentagon bonds.

Nuclear magnetic resonance measurements indicated that the adjacent pentagons are highly strained in the fullerene’s tightly bound molecular structure. Theorists speculated that the bond strain is so severe that C36 would likely prove to be the smallest fullerene to be made in bulk quantities. The extreme strain may also turn out to enhance the molecule’s superconducting properties. Like C60, C36 displays increased electrical conductivity when doped with alkali metals. Zettl speculated that C36 may prove to be a high-temperature superconductor with a higher transition temperature than that of C60.

Polyethylene’s great versatility makes it the single most popular plastic in the world. Although all polyethylene is made from repeating units of the same building-block molecule, the monomer ethylene, catalysts used in the polymerization process have dramatic effects on the physical properties of the plastic. Mixing ethylene with certain catalysts yields a polymer with long, straight, tough molecular chains termed high-density polyethylene (HDPE). HDPE is used to make plastic bottles, pipes, industrial drums, grocery bags, and other high-strength products. A different catalyst causes ethylene to polymerize into a more flexible but weaker material, low-density polyethylene (LDPE). LDPE is used for beverage-carton coatings, food packaging, cling wrap, trash bags, and other products.

American and British chemists, working independently, reported discovery of a new group of iron- and cobalt-based catalysts for polymerizing ethylene. Experts described the discovery as one of the first fundamentally new advances in the field since the 1970s. The catalysts were as active as the organometallic catalysts called metallocenes in current use for HDPE production--in some instances more active. They also had potential for producing a wider range of polymer materials at lower cost. In addition, the iron-based catalysts were substantially more active than current materials for the production of LDPE. Maurice Brookhart of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill headed the U.S. research team. Vernon C. Gibson of Imperial College, London, led the British group.

Adipic acid is the raw material needed for production of nylon, which is used in fabrics, carpets, tire reinforcements, automobile parts, and myriad other products. In the late 1990s about 2.2 million metric tons of adipic acid were produced worldwide each year, which made it one of the most important industrial chemicals. Conventional adipic acid manufacture involves the use of nitric acid to oxidize cyclohexanol or cyclohexanone. Growing interest in environmentally more benign chemical reactions, often called green chemistry, was making the traditional synthesis undesirable because it produces nitrous oxide as a by-product. Nitrous oxide was believed to contribute to depletion of stratospheric ozone and, as a greenhouse gas, to global warming. Despite the adoption of recovery and recycling technology for nitrous oxide, about 400,000 metric tons were released to the atmosphere annually. Adipic acid production accounted for 5-8% of nitrous oxide released into the atmosphere through human activity.

Kazuhiko Sato and associates at Nagoya (Japan) University reported development of a new, "green" synthetic pathway to adipic acid. It eliminated production of nitrous oxide and the use of potentially harmful organic solvents. Their alternative synthesis used 30% hydrogen peroxide to oxidize cyclohexene directly to colorless crystalline adipic acid under solvent- and halide-free conditions. Sato reported that the process was suitable for use on an industrial scale and could be the answer to the worldwide quest for a "green" method of synthesizing adipic acid. The major barrier was cost--hydrogen peroxide was substantially more expensive than nitric acid--but stricter environmental regulations on nitrous oxide emission could make the new synthetic process more attractive.


Particle Physics

Researchers in 1998 reported the most convincing evidence to date that the subatomic particle called the neutrino has mass. The standard model, science’s central theory of the basic constituents of the universe, involves three families of observable particles: baryons (such as protons and neutrons), leptons (such as electrons and neutrinos), and mesons. Of those particles the neutrino has been the most enigmatic. Its existence was first postulated in 1930 by the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli to explain the fact that energy appeared not to be conserved in nuclear beta decay (the decay of an atomic nucleus with the emission of an electron). Neutrinos interact so weakly with other matter that they are extraordinarily difficult to observe; confirmation of their existence did not come until a quarter century after Pauli’s prediction. The assumption that neutrinos are massless particles is built into the standard model, but there is no theoretical reason for them not to have a tiny mass.

Three types of neutrinos were known: electron neutrinos, emitted in beta decay; muon neutrinos, emitted in the decay of a particle known as a pion and first observed in 1962; and tau neutrinos, produced in the decay of an even more exotic particle, the tau. Although the existence of the tau neutrino had been supported by indirect evidence, it was only during 1998 that the particle was reported to have been observed for the first time. Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Batavia, Ill., carried out experiments in which they smashed a dense stream of protons into a tungsten target. Less than one collision in 10,000 produced a tau neutrino, but after months of taking data the Fermilab team claimed to have seen direct effects of at least three of these elusive particles.

That finding was overshadowed, however, by results from Super-Kamiokande, an experimental effort involving an international collaboration of physicists from 23 institutions and headed by the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Cosmic Ray Research. The mammoth Super-Kamiokande detector, which was situated 1,000 m (3,300 ft) below the surface in a Japanese zinc mine to minimize the effect of background radiation, comprised a 50,000-ton tank of ultrapure water that was surrounded by 13,000 individual detector elements. Super-Kamiokande was able to observe electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos (but not tau neutrinos) that are produced continually in Earth’s atmosphere by cosmic ray bombardment from space. Even that huge detector, however, was able to detect only one or two such neutrinos per day and required months of operation to accumulate sufficient data.

In 1998 Super-Kamiokande physicists reported a dramatic result. Whereas they found the rate of detection of electron neutrinos to be the same in all directions, they detected significantly fewer muon neutrinos coming upward through Earth than coming directly downward. Theory predicts that, if neutrinos have mass, muon neutrinos should transform, or oscillate, into tau neutrinos with a period depending on the mass difference between the two types. Those neutrinos traveling the longer distance through Earth to the detector had more time to decay. Results suggested a mass difference equal to one ten-millionth of the mass of the electron, giving positive evidence of the existence of neutrino mass and a lower bound for its value.

The result had two exciting consequences. First, because a nonzero mass for the neutrino is a phenomenon lying beyond the framework of the standard model, it may be the first glimpse of a possible new "grand unified" theory of particle physics that transcends the limitations of the current theory. Second, neutrinos with mass may be a solution to a major problem in cosmology. Present models of the universe require it to have a mass far in excess of the total mass of observable constituents. The presence in the cosmos of a total mass of billions of neutrinos may make up this deficit.

Solid-State Physics

In 1998 investigations of the physics of systems using single atoms and small numbers of electrons were making possible electronic devices that had been inconceivable just a few years earlier. These studies were being aided by the development of methods to manipulate single atoms or molecules with unprecedented precision and investigate their properties. In one example Elke Scheer and co-workers of the University of Karlsruhe, Ger., measured the electrical properties of a single atom forming a bridge across two conducting leads. Their achievement suggested the possibility of making even smaller and faster electronic switching devices.

In another development physicists from Yale University and Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Swed., produced a variant of the field-effect transistor (FET)--a basic building block of modern computer systems--called a single-electron transistor (SET). In a FET a flow of electrons through a semiconducting channel is switched on and off by a voltage in a nearby "gate" electrode. In a SET the semiconducting channel is replaced by an insulator, except for a tiny island of semiconductor halfway along the channel. In the device’s conducting mode a stream of electrons crosses the insulator by "hopping" one at a time on and off the island. Such devices were highly sensitive to switching voltages and extremely fast.

The SET achievement was an example of the developing physics of quantum dots, "droplets" of electric charge that can be produced and confined in semiconductors. Such droplets, having sizes measured in nanometres (billionths of a metre), can contain electrons ranging in number from a single particle to a tailored system of several thousands. Physicists from Delft (Neth.) University of Technology, Stanford University, and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in Japan used quantum dots to observe many quantum phenomena seen in real atoms and nuclei, from atomic energy level structures to quantum chaos. A typical quantum dot is produced in a piece of semiconductor a few hundred nanometres in diameter and 10 nanometres thick. The semiconductor is sandwiched between nonconducting barrier layers, which separate it from conductors above and below. In a process called quantum tunneling, electrons can pass through the barrier layers and enter and leave the semiconductor, forming the dot. Application of a voltage to a gate electrode around the semiconductor allows the number of electrons in the dot to be changed from none to as many as several hundred. By starting with one electron and adding one at a time, researchers can build up a "periodic table" of electron structures.

Such developments were giving physicists the ability to construct synthetic structures at atomic-scale levels to produce revolutionary new electronic components. At the same time, research was being conducted to identify the atoms or molecules that give the most promising results. Delft physicist Sander J. Tans and co-workers, for example, constructed a FET made of a single large molecule--a carbon nanotube--i.e., a hollow nanometre-scale tubule of bonded carbon atoms. Unlike other nanoscale devices, the FET worked at room temperature. Future generations of electronics could well be based on carbon rather than silicon.

Condensed-Matter Physics

Whereas the properties of ordinary condensed gases were long familiar to physicists, quantum mechanics predicted the possibility of one type of condensate having dramatically different properties. Most condensed gases consist of a collection of atoms in different quantum states. If, however, it were possible to prepare a condensate in which all the atoms were in the same quantum state, the collection would behave as a single macroscopic quantum entity with properties identical to those of a single atom. This form of matter was dubbed a Bose-Einstein condensate after the physicists--Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Bose--who originally envisaged its possibility in the early 20th century. There was no theoretical difficulty about producing such a condensate, but the practical difficulties were enormous, since it was necessary to cool a dilute gas near absolute zero (−273.15° C, or −459.67° F) in order to remove practically all its kinetic energy without causing it to condense into an ordinary liquid or solid.

Bose-Einstein condensates were first produced in 1995, but the condensate’s atoms were trapped in a magnetic "bottle," which had a distorting effect. The removal of such distortions was made possible by the development of laser cooling devices in which kinetic energy is "sucked away" from the atoms into the laser field. Using such a device, physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology succeeded in 1998 in producing a condensate of 100 million hydrogen atoms at a temperature of 40 millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Such a condensate exhibited macroscopic quantum effects like those seen in superfluids, and the interactions between individual atoms could be "tuned" by means of a magnetic field.

General Relativity

Although Einstein’s general theory of relativity is generally accepted, physicists have suggested other possible theories of gravitation. Two observations gave results in confirmation of predictions made by Einstein. One was the result of an experiment using two Lageos laser-ranging satellites and carried out by physicists from the University of Rome, the Laboratory of Spatial Astrophysics and Fundamental Physics, Madrid, and the University of Maryland. It investigated the Lense-Thirring effect, which predicts that time as measured by a clock traveling in orbit around a spinning object will vary, depending on whether the orbit is in the direction of the spin or against it. The parameter that measures the strength of the effect was found to have a value of 1.1 0.2, compared with general relativity’s prediction of 1.

A second, more dramatic prediction of general relativity was observed by a team of astronomers from the U.S., the U.K., France, and The Netherlands. According to the theory, in the same way that light can be focused by a glass lens, light from a distant luminous object can be focused by the distortion of space by a massive foreground object such as a galaxy--a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. In a special case, called an Einstein ring, the image of the light source will smear out into the shape of a perfect ring around the foreground object. Using three radio telescopes, the group zeroed in on a possible Einstein ring, after which an infrared camera on the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope imaged to reveal the complete ring--the first unambiguous case in optical and infrared light and a dazzling demonstration of Einstein’s theory.

Mathematics and Physical Sciences: Year In Review 1998
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