Current thinking on Left-Handed Materials

AbstractClifford Krowne is described as a theorist investigating the physical basis of negative refraction, who feels that a new physics is involved. “We are beaming waves around active devices that are quantum-sized [the structures have sizes in the same range as the wavelengths of the radiation],” he says. “We are looking for basic physics solutions that haven't been studied before.” He reports on this year's American Physical Society meeting in Montreal

Unusual magnetoresistance in a topological insulator with a single ferromagnetic barrier

Tunneling surface current through a thin ferromagnetic barrier in a three-dimensional topological insulator is shown to possess an extraordinary response to the orientation of barrier magnetization. In contrast to conventional magnetoresistance devices that are sensitive to the relative alignment of two magnetic layers, a drastic change in the transmission current is achieved by a single layer when its magnetization rotates by 90 degrees. Numerical estimations predict a giant magnetoresistance as large as 800 % at room temperature and the proximate exchange interaction of 40 meV in the barrier. When coupled with electrical control of magnetization direction, this phenomenon may be used to enhance the gating function with potentially sharp turn-on/off for low power applications

Building Digital Libraries from Simple Building Blocks

Metadata harvesting has been established by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) as a viable mechanism for connecting a provider of data to a purveyor of services. The Open Digital Library (ODL) model is an emerging framework which attempts to break up the services into appropriate components based also on the basic philosophy of the OAI model. This framework has been applied to various projects and evaluated for its simplicity, extensibility and reusability to support the hypothesis that digital libraries (DLs) should be built from simple Web Service-like components instead of as monolithic software applications