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Table of Contents January 2007

Feature Articles

The Bethe ansatz after 75 years
A 1931 result that lay in obscurity for decades, Bethe's solution to a quantum mechanical model now finds its way into everything from superconductors to string theory — Murray T. Batchelor

Mathematical adventures in biology
A short personal tour of biological systems reveals the flavor and variety of biological questions amenable to illumination by mathematical analysis — Michael W. Deem

The early days of precision laser spectroscopy
In the 1960s and 1970s, spectroscopists developed a host of nonlinear techniques to measure the interaction of light and matter with a resolution fine enough to test quantum electrodynamics and optically detect weak interactions in atoms — Richard G. Brewer, Aram Mooradian, and Boris P. Stoicheff

News

search & discovery

Soft x rays from a free-electron laser resolve a single, micron-sized structure

High-redshift supernovae indicate that dark energy has been around for 10 billion years

Proteins crystallize more readily when they are first induced to pair up

Physics update

Issues & Events

Germany singles out universities for excellence

Gift puts private university in Germany in the black

Democrats expect to push strong science agenda in new Congress

Fermilab's new management looks to land linear collider

Nanotechnology in manufacturing is the focus of Industrial Physics Forum

Keeping women in physics is aim of conference for undergrads

News notes

Web watch

Departments

Reference Frame

Belief and knowledge—a plea about language
— Helen Quinn


Physics Today cover - Mathematical adventures in biology
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cover: Proteins are composed of structurally distinct modules such as in the enzyme ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase, shown here. The modular structure appears to facilitate evolution by allowing for the insertion, deletion, and exchange of pieces of DNA that encode functional pieces of proteins. Understanding the relation between modular structure and evolution rate is difficult, but it may be susceptible to mathematical analysis. To learn more about this and other problems in mathematical biology, turn to the feature article by Michael W. Deem beginning on page 42.

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