PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE A digest of physics news items by Phillip F. Schewe, American Institut

PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
A digest of physics news items by Phillip F. Schewe, American
Institute of Physics
Number 182  June 8, 1994

RADIOACTIVE ATOMS HAVE BEEN TRAPPED using a
combination of laser beams and magnetic fields.  Luis Orozco and his
colleagues at Stony Brook produced rubidium-79 isotopes and sent
them into a glass cell, where the atoms bounced back and forth
between special non-stick walls until they rebounded slowly enough
to become captured by the magneto-optical trap at the center of the
cell.  A Berkeley team led by Stuart Freedman slowed down a beam
of sodium-21 atoms with lasers before the atoms entered the magneto-
optical trap.  In efforts to learn how to trap atoms efficiently,
Michelle Stephens and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado
released stable cesium atoms into a cell, also with non-stick walls,
and succeeded in holding 6% of the atoms at a time.  The Colorado
researchers predict that collection efficiencies can be as high as 50%
for atoms in an optimal magneto-optical trap.  The Stony Brook and
Colorado groups are each interested in studying the phenomenon
known as parity violation in radioactive isotopes, while the Berkeley
group is interested in making precise measurements of beta decay.
(G. Gwinner et al., Z-T. Lu et al., and M. Stephens et al., Physical
Review Letters, 13 June 1994.)

ONLY 21% OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS ENROLL IN
PHYSICS in the U.S., even though 98% of students go to schools
that offer physics classes.  By comparison, nearly 50% of students
take chemistry.  "Physics in the High Schools," the second in a series
of reports issued by AIP, reveals that only 15% of female students
and 10% of black and Hispanic students take physics. About 1% of
all students take a second year of physics.  In the wake of the 1983
report "Nation at Risk," many states raised their high school
requirements from one to two years of science, but this has had little
impact on physics enrollment since physics is still traditionally offered
only after students take biology and chemistry.  In 1989-90, the most
recent year sampled in the AIP report, 620,000 high school students
were enrolled in physics classes in the U.S.  About 18,300 teachers---
only 27% of whom had college physics degrees---taught physics.
Among these, 96% were white, 2% black, 1% Hispanic, and 1%
Asian.  (For more information, contact Michael Neuschatz, AIP
Statistics Division, 301-209-3077.)

RUSSIA'S 3-TeV PROTON ACCELERATOR, under construction at
the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Protvino, may not be
completed.  Like many scientific ventures in the former Soviet Union,
the project is starved for funds.  Much of the accelerator's 21-km
tunnel has been built and many of the needed magnets have been
tested and stockpiled, but there now appears to be no more money for
finishing the machine.  Other physics labs, such as the Institute of
Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) and the Kapitsa Institute
(prominent in low-temperature research) in Moscow are close to
collapse.  At the Joint Institute of Nuclear Physics (JINR) in Dubna,
things are somewhat better, partly because of the continued
collaboration with scientists from the former Soviet republics and
from Germany.  (Science, 27 May.)

NEXT WEEK'S PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE will consist of
information about our switch to a listserver, which should better
automate the transmission of issues via electronic mail.  Correction:
Update 180 should have read American Geophysical Union (not
Society).  Also: last week's Update was number 181 and not 182.
This issue is number 182