Friday, September 28, 2018
Annual Nobel speculation thread
As my friend DanM pointed out in the comments of a previous post, it's Nobel season again, next Tuesday for physics. Dan puts forward his prediction of Pendry and Smith for metamaterials/negative index of refraction. (You could throw in Yablonovitch for metamaterials.) I will, once again, make my annual (almost certainly wrong) prediction of Aharonov and Berry for geometric phases. Another possibility in this dawning age of quantum information is Aspect, Zeilinger, and Clauser for Bell's inequality tests. Probably not an astrophysics one, since gravitational radiation was the winner last year.
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Another commonly heard guess is Paul Corkum and Ferenc Krausz, for attosecond science. Sometimes, Margaret Murnane is added to that list. That would be well-deserved. But I think Pendry and Smith are more likely.
Topological insulators would be another reasonable guess.
Topological insulators was the focus of the prize two years ago. Unlikely to be repeated.
People also occasionally mention Lena Hau for slow light measurements, but I don't see it.
I think that soft matter physics is going to come out of nowhere and surprise everyone. Maybe Paul Chaikin?
Soft matter would be near impossible, I'd think. After they didn't give it to Sam Edwards together with de Gennes, it's hard to think of anyone with comparable impact on the field.
(By the way, Yablonovich would not be cited for metamaterials. He had little or nothing to do with that field, which more or less started with Pendry's 1999 paper on engineering negative permeability in resonant composites. Yablonovich is generally considered the pioneer (along with Sajeev John, University of Toronto) of the field of photonic crystals, starting from papers they each wrote in the late 1980's. Despite many comments to the contrary, there really is a difference between a photonic crystal and a metamaterial.)
Dan, what would you consider the difference between a photonic band gap system and a metamaterial? In both cases you have a dielectric function structured on a length scale comparable to a fraction of a wavelength, giving designer dispersion.
A photonic crystal is structured on a length scale of about lambda/2, giving rise to diffractive effects. In other words, the light explicitly 'sees' the modulation of the dielectric function.
In contrast, a metamaterial is structured on a much smaller length scale, typically lambda/10 or smaller, and operates on the principle of homogenization - i.e., the wavelength of the radiation is much larger than the constituent 'atoms' and therefore experiences an effective permittivity and permeability which are averaged over many atoms.
A less important distinction is that metamaterials typically involve engineering both permittivity and permeability, whereas in the case of photonic crystals, one mostly just engineers the permittivity, not the permeability. This is not uniformly true, just most often the case. Although the area of all-dielectric metamaterials is a hot topic these days, the majority of metamaterial work has historically involved exploiting (very subwavelength) metallic resonators. Photonic crystals have mostly been made of purely dielectric materials, no metals involved.
p.s. Mourou and Strickland! Yay! Also, Ashkin! About damned time.
One thing common among Nobel laureates is that their continuous efforts and inputs in to that specific area. If you examine what Yablonovich has been doing in the past decade or so, you won't want him to get a Nobel price.
@fevri:
I disagree. An individual's ongoing contributions are not typically a determining factor in the awarding of the Nobel prize. It is not usually a 'career achievement' award, nor is it supposed to be. It is generally awarded for one seminal achievement. (Of course, there have been exceptions, but their rarity proves the point.) It is not hard to argue that Eli had one seminal achievement, when he first described photonic crystals. What he has done in the last decade makes little difference.
Indeed, there are many (very deserving) laureates whose scientific output dropped considerably in the years after the big contribution that would eventually win them a Nobel. And that drop doesn't mean that they didn't deserve to win.
@DanM
I totally understand your point and I agree with that: Nobel is not a career achievement.
Let me put it this way: if the captain is leaving the ship, probably that ship is sinking.
photonic crystals, plasmonics, graphene...
@fevri:
No argument there. Lots of fields get over-hyped. Some of them get Nobel prizes also.
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