By Patricia Daukantas
For this month’s issue of OPN, I wrote about a possible new way to kill disease-causing viruses with pulses from a femtosecond laser (see "Fine-Tuned Lasers Zap Deadly Germs," Scatterings, p. 8).
Two of physicist K.T. Tsen’s colleagues at Arizona State University have done numerical simulations to explore the intrinsic vibration modes of capsids, which are the protein shells around individual virus particles. The American Institute of Physics has posted a short article on the research, which appears in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.