IBM Research Division
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
It's easy to see solitons in macroscopic systems such as streams, but they proved to be very slippery in microscopic systems. A recent paper reports direct observations of soliton-antisoliton collision processes in a discrete Josephson transmission line.
K. Nakajima, H. Mizusawa, Y. Sawada, "Experimental observation of spatiotemporal wave forms of all possible types of soliton-antisoliton interactions in Josephson transmission lines," Physical Review Letters, 65, 1667-70, 24 September 1990. (Tohuku University, Sendai, Japan; Electrotechnical Laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan)
What do you do if you want to study "self-organized criticality" in nonequilibrium systems, a property that may account for such ubiquitous phenomena as 1/f noise and fractal structures? You build sandpiles and watch them crash, of course! A recent paper reports a set of experiments with sandpiles that revealed fascinating results about self-criticality.
G.A. Held, D.H. Solina II, D.T. Keane, W.J. Haag, ...
