Gold discovery

The Williams Brook gold discovery - northern New Brunswick Heather Campbell Art Hamilton ... 

Exploration. Because it takes years to bring a mine into production, significant new copper deposits are sought and known reserves are expanded more or less continually. These exploration expenditures are highly sensitive to metal market conditions, and, as of this writing, gold is at a better price level than copper. Worldwide exploration continues, however, even after discovery of a deposit and the start of mining. 

However, the main research result from those years was the discovery of the room-temperature single-electron phenomenon. In the 1990s, STM experiments on liquid crystal had shown a very weak staircase (Nejoh 1991) only one year later, the clear observations of the coulomb blockade and the coulomb staircase were demonstrated on gold nanoparticles (Shonenberger et al. 1992a) and the role of system symmetry on the appearance of these two phenomena was outlined (Shonenberger et al. 1992b). 

Chemical advances frequently are driven by technology. The discovery that atoms have inner structure was an outgrowth of the technology for working with radioactive materials. In Chapter 2 we describe a famous experiment in which the structure of atoms was studied by bombarding a thin gold foil with subatomic particles. A contemporary example is the use of lasers to study the details of chemical reactions. We introduce these ideas in Chapters 7 and 8. 

Much research on the Hishikari deposits has been carried out since the discovery of gold veins in 1981. Urashima and Izawa (1983) reported fluid inclusion studies using core samples. Abe et al. (1986) made a detailed description of the veins. The regional geology of this district is described in MMAJ and SMM (1987) and Urashima et al. (1987). 

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