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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.

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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)

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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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