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Granular matter

Charges dropped

Nature Physics volume 11, pages 709–710 (2015)Cite this article

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Granular charging can create some spectacular interactions, but gravity obscures our ability to observe and understand them. A neat desktop experiment circumvents this problem, shining a light on granular clustering — and perhaps even planet formation.

Nearly 2,600 years ago, Thales of Miletus noticed that amber rubbed against wool attracted straw — an effect that must have seemed quite mystical at the time. It is perhaps no coincidence then that the term electricity originates from the Greek word for amber. The electrostatic forces between charged dielectric materials have continued to capture our attention since the time of the ancient Greeks. And now, writing in Nature Physics, Victor Lee and colleagues1 have found a way of better understanding these forces without the confounding effects of gravity.

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Figure 1: An image of a protoplanetary disk around the young (about a million-year-old) star HL Tau taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Frank Spahn and Martin Seiβ are in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam, 14469 Potsdam, Germany,

    Frank Spahn & Martin Seiβ

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  1. Frank Spahn
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  2. Martin Seiβ
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Correspondence to Frank Spahn.

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Spahn, F., Seiβ, M. Charges dropped. Nature Phys 11, 709–710 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3417

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