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A modern Wintel-compatible computer provides a setup routine essentially unchanged in nature from the ROM-resident BIOS setup utilities of the late 1990s; the user can configure hardware options using the keyboard and video display. The modern Wintel machine may store the BIOS configuration settings in flash ROM, perhaps the same flash ROM that holds the BIOS itself.
Extensions (option ROMs).
Peripheral cards such as hard disk drive host bus adapters and video cards have their own firmware, and BIOS extension option ROM code may be a part of the expansion card firmware; that code provides additional capabilities in the BIOS. Code in option ROMs runs before the BIOS boots the operating system from mass storage. These ROMs typically test and initialize hardware, add new BIOS services, or replace existing BIOS services with their own services. For example, a SCSI controller usually has a BIOS extension ROM that adds support for hard drives connected through that controller. An extension ROM could in principle contain operating system, or it could implement an entirely different boot process such as network booting. Operation of an IBM-compatible computer system can be completely changed by removing or inserting an adapter card (or a ROM chip) that contains a BIOS extension ROM.
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The motherboard BIOS typically contains code for initializing and bootstrapping integrated display and integrated storage. The initialization process can involve the execution of code related to the device being initialized, for locating the device, verifying the type of device, then establishing base registers, setting pointers, establishing interrupt vector tables, selecting paging modes which are ways for organizing available registers in devices, setting default values for accessing software routines related to interrupts, and setting the device's configuration using default values. In addition, plug-in adapter cards such as SCSI, RAID, network interface cards, and video cards often include their own BIOS (e.g. Video BIOS), complementing or replacing the system BIOS code for the given component. Even devices built into the motherboard can behave in this way; their option ROMs can be a part of the motherboard BIOS.
An add-in card requires an option ROM if the card is not supported by the motherboard BIOS and the card needs to be initialized or made accessible through BIOS services before the operating system can be loaded (usually this means it is required in the boot process). An additional advantage of ROM on some early PC systems (notably including the IBM PCjr) was that ROM was faster than main system RAM. (On modern systems, the case is very much the reverse of this, and BIOS ROM code is usually copied ("shadowed") into RAM so it will run faster.)
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Physical placement.
Option ROMs normally reside on adapter cards. However, the original PC, and perhaps also the PC XT, have a spare ROM socket on the motherboard (the "system board" in IBM's terms) into which an option ROM can be inserted, and the four ROMs that contain the BASIC interpreter can also be removed and replaced with custom ROMs which can be option ROMs. The IBM PCjr is unique among PCs in having two ROM cartridge slots on the front. Cartridges in these slots map into the same region of the upper memory area used for option ROMs, and the cartridges can contain option ROM modules that the BIOS would recognize. The cartridges can also contain other types of ROM modules, such as BASIC programs, that are handled differently. One PCjr cartridge can contain several ROM modules of different types, possibly stored together in one ROM chip.
Operation.
System startup.
The 8086 and 8088 start at physical address FFFF0h. The 80286 starts at physical address FFFFF0h. The 80386 and later x86 processors start at physical address FFFFFFF0h. When the system is initialized, the first instruction of the BIOS appears at that address.
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If the system has just been powered up or the reset button was pressed ("cold boot"), the full power-on self-test (POST) is run. If Ctrl+Alt+Delete was pressed ("warm boot"), a special flag value stored in nonvolatile BIOS memory ("CMOS") tested by the BIOS allows bypass of the lengthy POST and memory detection.
The POST identifies, tests and initializes system devices such as the CPU, chipset, RAM, motherboard, video card, keyboard, mouse, hard disk drive, optical disc drive and other hardware, including integrated peripherals.
Early IBM PCs had a routine in the POST that would download a program into RAM through the keyboard port and run it. This feature was intended for factory test or diagnostic purposes.
After the motherboard BIOS completes its POST, most BIOS versions search for option ROM modules, also called BIOS extension ROMs, and execute them. The motherboard BIOS scans for extension ROMs in a portion of the "upper memory area" (the part of the x86 real-mode address space at and above address 0xA0000) and runs each ROM found, in order. To discover memory-mapped option ROMs, a BIOS implementation scans the real-mode address space from codice_1 to codice_2 on 2 KB (2,048 bytes) boundaries, looking for a two-byte ROM "signature": 0x55 followed by 0xAA. In a valid expansion ROM, this signature is followed by a single byte indicating the number of 512-byte blocks the expansion ROM occupies in real memory, and the next byte is the option ROM's entry point (also known as its "entry offset"). If the ROM has a valid checksum, the BIOS transfers control to the entry address, which in a normal BIOS extension ROM should be the beginning of the extension's initialization routine.
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At this point, the extension ROM code takes over, typically testing and initializing the hardware it controls and registering interrupt vectors for use by post-boot applications. It may use BIOS services (including those provided by previously initialized option ROMs) to provide a user configuration interface, to display diagnostic information, or to do anything else that it requires.
An option ROM should normally return to the BIOS after completing its initialization process. Once (and if) an option ROM returns, the BIOS continues searching for more option ROMs, calling each as it is found, until the entire option ROM area in the memory space has been scanned. It is possible that an option ROM will not return to BIOS, pre-empting the BIOS's boot sequence altogether.
Boot process.
After the POST completes and, in a BIOS that supports option ROMs, after the option ROM scan is completed and all detected ROM modules with valid checksums have been called, the BIOS calls interrupt 19h to start boot processing. Post-boot, programs loaded can also call interrupt 19h to reboot the system, but they must be careful to disable interrupts and other asynchronous hardware processes that may interfere with the BIOS rebooting process, or else the system may hang or crash while it is rebooting.
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When interrupt 19h is called, the BIOS attempts to locate boot loader software on a "boot device", such as a hard disk, a floppy disk, CD, or DVD. It loads and executes the first boot software it finds, giving it control of the PC.
The BIOS uses the boot devices set in Nonvolatile BIOS memory (CMOS), or, in the earliest PCs, DIP switches. The BIOS checks each device in order to see if it is bootable by attempting to load the first sector (boot sector). If the sector cannot be read, the BIOS proceeds to the next device. If the sector is read successfully, some BIOSes will also check for the boot sector signature 0x55 0xAA in the last two bytes of the sector (which is 512 bytes long), before accepting a boot sector and considering the device bootable.
When a bootable device is found, the BIOS transfers control to the loaded sector. The BIOS does not interpret the contents of the boot sector other than to possibly check for the boot sector signature in the last two bytes. Interpretation of data structures like partition tables and BIOS Parameter Blocks is done by the boot program in the boot sector itself or by other programs loaded through the boot process.
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A non-disk device such as a network adapter attempts booting by a procedure that is defined by its option ROM or the equivalent integrated into the motherboard BIOS ROM. As such, option ROMs may also influence or supplant the boot process defined by the motherboard BIOS ROM.
With the El Torito optical media boot standard, the optical drive actually emulates a 3.5" high-density floppy disk to the BIOS for boot purposes. Reading the "first sector" of a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM is not a simply defined operation like it is on a floppy disk or a hard disk. Furthermore, the complexity of the medium makes it difficult to write a useful boot program in one sector. The bootable virtual floppy disk can contain software that provides access to the optical medium in its native format.
If an expansion ROM wishes to change the way the system boots (such as from a network device or a SCSI adapter) in a cooperative way, it can use the "BIOS Boot Specification" (BBS) API to register its ability to do so. Once the expansion ROMs have registered using the BBS APIs, the user can select among the available boot options from within the BIOS's user interface. This is why most BBS compliant PC BIOS implementations will not allow the user to enter the BIOS's user interface until the expansion ROMs have finished executing and registering themselves with the BBS API.
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Also, if an expansion ROM wishes to change the way the system boots unilaterally, it can simply hook interrupt 19h or other interrupts normally called from interrupt 19h, such as interrupt 13h, the BIOS disk service, to intercept the BIOS boot process. Then it can replace the BIOS boot process with one of its own, or it can merely modify the boot sequence by inserting its own boot actions into it, by preventing the BIOS from detecting certain devices as bootable, or both. Before the BIOS Boot Specification was promulgated, this was the only way for expansion ROMs to implement boot capability for devices not supported for booting by the native BIOS of the motherboard.
Boot priority.
The user can select the boot priority implemented by the BIOS. For example, most computers have a hard disk that is bootable, but sometimes there is a removable-media drive that has higher boot priority, so the user can cause a removable disk to be booted.
In most modern BIOSes, the boot priority order can be configured by the user. In older BIOSes, limited boot priority options are selectable; in the earliest BIOSes, a fixed priority scheme was implemented, with floppy disk drives first, fixed disks (i.e., hard disks) second, and typically no other boot devices supported, subject to modification of these rules by installed option ROMs. The BIOS in an early PC also usually would only boot from the first floppy disk drive or the first hard disk drive, even if there were two drives installed.
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Boot failure.
On the original IBM PC and XT, if no bootable disk was found, the BIOS would try to start ROM BASIC with the interrupt call to . Since few programs used BASIC in ROM, clone PC makers left it out; then a computer that failed to boot from a disk would display "No ROM BASIC" and halt (in response to interrupt 18h).
Later computers would display a message like "No bootable disk found"; some would prompt for a disk to be inserted and a key to be pressed to retry the boot process. A modern BIOS may display nothing or may automatically enter the BIOS configuration utility when the boot process fails.
Boot environment.
The environment for the boot program is very simple: the CPU is in real mode and the general-purpose and segment registers are undefined, except SS, SP, CS, and DL. CS:IP always points to physical address codice_3. What values CS and IP actually have is not well defined. Some BIOSes use a CS:IP of codice_4 while others may use codice_5. Because boot programs are always loaded at this fixed address, there is no need for a boot program to be relocatable. |
Some BIOSes use a CS:IP of codice_4 while others may use codice_5. Because boot programs are always loaded at this fixed address, there is no need for a boot program to be relocatable. DL may contain the drive number, as used with interrupt 13h, of the boot device. SS:SP points to a valid stack that is presumably large enough to support hardware interrupts, but otherwise SS and SP are undefined. (A stack must be already set up in order for interrupts to be serviced, and interrupts must be enabled in order for the system timer-tick interrupt, which BIOS always uses at least to maintain the time-of-day count and which it initializes during POST, to be active and for the keyboard to work. The keyboard works even if the BIOS keyboard service is not called; keystrokes are received and placed in the 15-character type-ahead buffer maintained by BIOS.) The boot program must set up its own stack, because the size of the stack set up by BIOS is unknown and its location is likewise variable; although the boot program can investigate the default stack by examining SS:SP, it is easier and shorter to just unconditionally set up a new stack.
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At boot time, all BIOS services are available, and the memory below address codice_6 contains the interrupt vector table. BIOS POST has initialized the system timers, interrupt controller(s), DMA controller(s), and other motherboard/chipset hardware as necessary to bring all BIOS services to ready status. DRAM refresh for all system DRAM in conventional memory and extended memory, but not necessarily expanded memory, has been set up and is running. The interrupt vectors corresponding to the BIOS interrupts have been set to point at the appropriate entry points in the BIOS, hardware interrupt vectors for devices initialized by the BIOS have been set to point to the BIOS-provided ISRs, and some other interrupts, including ones that BIOS generates for programs to hook, have been set to a default dummy ISR that immediately returns. The BIOS maintains a reserved block of system RAM at addresses codice_7 with various parameters initialized during the POST. All memory at and above address codice_8 can be used by the boot program; it may even overwrite itself.
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Operating system services.
The BIOS ROM is customized to the particular manufacturer's hardware, allowing low-level services (such as reading a keystroke or writing a sector of data to diskette) to be provided in a standardized way to programs, including operating systems. For example, an IBM PC might have either a monochrome or a color display adapter (using different display memory addresses and hardware), but a single, standard, BIOS system call may be invoked to display a character at a specified position on the screen in text mode or graphics mode.
The BIOS provides a small library of basic input/output functions to operate peripherals (such as the keyboard, rudimentary text and graphics display functions and so forth). When using MS-DOS, BIOS services could be accessed by an application program (or by MS-DOS) by executing an interrupt 13h interrupt instruction to access disk functions, or by executing one of a number of other documented BIOS interrupt calls to access video display, keyboard, cassette, and other device functions.
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Operating systems and executive software that are designed to supersede this basic firmware functionality provide replacement software interfaces to application software. Applications can also provide these services to themselves. This began even in the 1980s under MS-DOS, when programmers observed that using the BIOS video services for graphics display were very slow. To increase the speed of screen output, many programs bypassed the BIOS and programmed the video display hardware directly. Other graphics programmers, particularly but not exclusively in the demoscene, observed that there were technical capabilities of the PC display adapters that were not supported by the IBM BIOS and could not be taken advantage of without circumventing it. Since the AT-compatible BIOS ran in Intel real mode, operating systems that ran in protected mode on 286 and later processors required hardware device drivers compatible with protected mode operation to replace BIOS services.
In modern PCs running modern operating systems (such as Windows and Linux) the BIOS interrupt calls are used only during booting and initial loading of operating systems. Before the operating system's first graphical screen is displayed, input and output are typically handled through BIOS. A boot menu such as the textual menu of Windows, which allows users to choose an operating system to boot, to boot into the safe mode, or to use the last known good configuration, is displayed through BIOS and receives keyboard input through BIOS.
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Many modern PCs can still boot and run legacy operating systems such as MS-DOS or DR-DOS that rely heavily on BIOS for their console and disk I/O, providing that the system has a BIOS, or a CSM-capable UEFI firmware.
Processor microcode updates.
Intel processors have reprogrammable microcode since the P6 microarchitecture. AMD processors have reprogrammable microcode since the K7 microarchitecture. The BIOS contain patches to the processor microcode that fix errors in the initial processor microcode; microcode is loaded into processor's SRAM so reprogramming is not persistent, thus loading of microcode updates is performed each time the system is powered up. Without reprogrammable microcode, an expensive processor swap would be required; for example, the Pentium FDIV bug became an expensive fiasco for Intel as it required a product recall because the original Pentium processor's defective microcode could not be reprogrammed. Operating systems can update main processor microcode also.
Identification.
Some BIOSes contain a software licensing description table (SLIC), a digital signature placed inside the BIOS by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), for example Dell. The SLIC is inserted into the ACPI data table and contains no active code.
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Computer manufacturers that distribute OEM versions of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft application software can use the SLIC to authenticate licensing to the OEM Windows Installation disk and system recovery disc containing Windows software. Systems with a SLIC can be preactivated with an OEM product key, and they verify an XML formatted OEM certificate against the SLIC in the BIOS as a means of self-activating (see System Locked Preinstallation, SLP). If a user performs a fresh install of Windows, they will need to have possession of both the OEM key (either SLP or COA) and the digital certificate for their SLIC in order to bypass activation. This can be achieved if the user performs a restore using a pre-customised image provided by the OEM. Power users can copy the necessary certificate files from the OEM image, decode the SLP product key, then perform SLP activation manually.
Overclocking.
Some BIOS implementations allow overclocking, an action in which the CPU is adjusted to a higher clock rate than its manufacturer rating for guaranteed capability. Overclocking may, however, seriously compromise system reliability in insufficiently cooled computers and generally shorten component lifespan. Overclocking, when incorrectly performed, may also cause components to overheat so quickly that they mechanically destroy themselves.
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Modern use.
Some older operating systems, for example MS-DOS, rely on the BIOS to carry out most input/output tasks within the PC.
Calling real mode BIOS services directly is inefficient for protected mode (and long mode) operating systems. BIOS interrupt calls are not used by modern multitasking operating systems after they initially load.
In the 1990s, BIOS provided some protected mode interfaces for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems, such as Advanced Power Management (APM), Plug and Play BIOS, Desktop Management Interface (DMI), VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE), e820 and MultiProcessor Specification (MPS). Starting from the year 2000, most BIOSes provide ACPI, SMBIOS, VBE and e820 interfaces for modern operating systems.
After operating systems load, the System Management Mode code is still running in SMRAM. Since 2010, BIOS technology is in a transitional process toward UEFI.
Configuration.
Setup utility.
Historically, the BIOS in the IBM PC and XT had no built-in user interface. The BIOS versions in earlier PCs (XT-class) were not software configurable; instead, users set the options via DIP switches on the motherboard. Later computers, including most IBM-compatibles with 80286 CPUs, had a battery-backed nonvolatile BIOS memory (CMOS RAM chip) that held BIOS settings. These settings, such as video-adapter type, memory size, and hard-disk parameters, could only be configured by running a configuration program from a disk, not built into the ROM. A special "reference diskette" was inserted in an IBM AT to configure settings such as memory size.
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Early BIOS versions did not have passwords or boot-device selection options. The BIOS was hard-coded to boot from the first floppy drive, or, if that failed, the first hard disk. Access control in early AT-class machines was by a physical keylock switch (which was not hard to defeat if the computer case could be opened). Anyone who could switch on the computer could boot it.
Later, 386-class computers started integrating the BIOS setup utility in the ROM itself, alongside the BIOS code; these computers usually boot into the BIOS setup utility if a certain key or key combination is pressed, otherwise the BIOS POST and boot process are executed.
A modern BIOS setup utility has a text user interface (TUI) or graphical user interface (GUI) accessed by pressing a certain key on the keyboard when the PC starts. Usually, the key is advertised for short time during the early startup, for example "Press DEL to enter Setup".
The actual key depends on specific hardware. The settings key is most often Delete (Acer, ASRock, Asus PC, ECS, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac) and F2 (Asus motherboard, Dell, Lenovo laptop, Origin PC, Samsung, Toshiba), but it can also be F1 (Lenovo desktop) and F10 (HP).
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Features present in the BIOS setup utility typically include:
Hardware monitoring.
A modern BIOS setup screen often features a PC Health Status or a Hardware Monitoring tab, which directly interfaces with a Hardware Monitor chip of the mainboard. This makes it possible to monitor CPU and chassis temperature, the voltage provided by the power supply unit, as well as monitor and control the speed of the fans connected to the motherboard.
Once the system is booted, hardware monitoring and computer fan control is normally done directly by the Hardware Monitor chip itself, which can be a separate chip, interfaced through I²C or SMBus, or come as a part of a Super I/O solution, interfaced through Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) or Low Pin Count (LPC). Some operating systems, like NetBSD with envsys and OpenBSD with sysctl hw.sensors, feature integrated interfacing with hardware monitors.
However, in some circumstances, the BIOS also provides the underlying information about hardware monitoring through ACPI, in which case, the operating system may be using ACPI to perform hardware monitoring.
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Reprogramming.
In modern PCs the BIOS is stored in rewritable EEPROM or NOR flash memory, allowing the contents to be replaced and modified. This rewriting of the contents is sometimes termed "flashing." It can be done by a special program, usually provided by the system's manufacturer, or at POST, with a BIOS image in a hard drive or USB flash drive. A file containing such contents is sometimes termed "a BIOS image". A BIOS might be reflashed in order to upgrade to a newer version to fix bugs or provide improved performance or to support newer hardware. Some computers also support updating the BIOS via an update floppy disk or a special partition on the hard drive.
Hardware.
The original IBM PC BIOS (and cassette BASIC) was stored on mask-programmed read-only memory (ROM) chips in sockets on the motherboard. ROMs could be replaced, but not altered, by users. To allow for updates, many compatible computers used re-programmable BIOS memory devices such as EPROM, EEPROM and later flash memory (usually NOR flash) devices. According to Robert Braver, the president of the BIOS manufacturer Micro Firmware, Flash BIOS chips became common around 1995 because the electrically erasable PROM (EEPROM) chips are cheaper and easier to program than standard ultraviolet erasable PROM (EPROM) chips. Flash chips are programmed (and re-programmed) in-circuit, while EPROM chips need to be removed from the motherboard for re-programming. BIOS versions are upgraded to take advantage of newer versions of hardware and to correct bugs in previous revisions of BIOSes.
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Beginning with the IBM AT, PCs supported a hardware clock settable through BIOS. It had a century bit which allowed for manually changing the century when the year 2000 happened. Most BIOS revisions created in 1995 and nearly all BIOS revisions in 1997 supported the year 2000 by setting the century bit automatically when the clock rolled past midnight, 31 December 1999.
The first flash chips were attached to the ISA bus. Starting in 1998, the BIOS flash moved to the LPC bus, following a new standard implementation known as "firmware hub" (FWH). In 2005, the BIOS flash memory moved to the SPI bus.
The size of the BIOS, and the capacity of the ROM, EEPROM, or other media it may be stored on, has increased over time as new features have been added to the code; BIOS versions now exist with sizes up to 32 megabytes. For contrast, the original IBM PC BIOS was contained in an 8 KB mask ROM. Some modern motherboards are including even bigger NAND flash memory ICs on board which are capable of storing whole compact operating systems, such as some Linux distributions. For example, some ASUS notebooks included Splashtop OS embedded into their NAND flash memory ICs. However, the idea of including an operating system along with BIOS in the ROM of a PC is not new; in the 1980s, Microsoft offered a ROM option for MS-DOS, and it was included in the ROMs of some PC clones such as the Tandy 1000 HX.
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Another type of firmware chip was found on the IBM PC AT and early compatibles. In the AT, the keyboard interface was controlled by a microcontroller with its own programmable memory. On the IBM AT, that was a 40-pin socketed device, while some manufacturers used an EPROM version of this chip which resembled an EPROM. This controller was also assigned the A20 gate function to manage memory above the one-megabyte range; occasionally an upgrade of this "keyboard BIOS" was necessary to take advantage of software that could use upper memory.
The BIOS may contain components such as the Memory Reference Code (MRC), which is responsible for the memory initialization (e.g. SPD and memory timings initialization).
Modern BIOS includes
Intel Management Engine or AMD Platform Security Processor firmware.
Vendors and products.
IBM published the entire listings of the BIOS for its original PC, PC XT, PC AT, and other contemporary PC models, in an appendix of the "IBM PC Technical Reference Manual" for each machine type. The effect of the publication of the BIOS listings is that anyone can see exactly what a definitive BIOS does and how it does it.
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In May 1984, Phoenix Software Associates released its first ROM-BIOS. This BIOS enabled OEMs to build essentially fully compatible clones without having to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS themselves, as Compaq had done for the Portable; it also helped fuel the growth in the PC-compatibles industry and sales of non-IBM versions of DOS. The first American Megatrends (AMI) BIOS was released in 1986.
New standards grafted onto the BIOS are usually without complete public documentation or any BIOS listings. As a result, it is not as easy to learn the intimate details about the many non-IBM additions to BIOS as about the core BIOS services.
Many PC motherboard suppliers licensed the BIOS "core" and toolkit from a commercial third party, known as an "independent BIOS vendor" or IBV. The motherboard manufacturer then customized this BIOS to suit its own hardware. For this reason, updated BIOSes are normally obtained directly from the motherboard manufacturer. Major IBVs included American Megatrends (AMI), Insyde Software, Phoenix Technologies, and Byosoft. Microid Research and Award Software were acquired by Phoenix Technologies in 1998; Phoenix later phased out the Award brand name (although Award Software is still credited in newer AwardBIOS versions and in UEFI firmwares). General Software, which was also acquired by Phoenix in 2007, sold BIOS for embedded systems based on Intel processors.
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SeaBIOS is an open-source BIOS implementation.
Open-source BIOS replacements.
The open-source community increased their effort to develop a replacement for proprietary BIOSes and their future incarnations with an open-sourced counterparts. Open Firmware was an early attempt to make an open specification for boot firmware. It was initially endorsed by IEEE in its "IEEE 1275-1994" standard but was withdrawn in 2005. Later examples include the OpenBIOS, coreboot and libreboot projects. AMD provided product specifications for some chipsets using coreboot, and Google is sponsoring the project. Motherboard manufacturer Tyan offers coreboot next to the standard BIOS with their Opteron line of motherboards.
Security.
EEPROM and flash memory chips are advantageous because they can be easily updated by the user; it is customary for hardware manufacturers to issue BIOS updates to upgrade their products, improve compatibility and remove bugs. However, this advantage had the risk that an improperly executed or aborted BIOS update could render the computer or device unusable. To avoid these situations, more recent BIOSes use a "boot block"; a portion of the BIOS which runs first and must be updated separately. This code verifies if the rest of the BIOS is intact (using hash checksums or other methods) before transferring control to it. If the boot block detects any corruption in the main BIOS, it will typically warn the user that a recovery process must be initiated by booting from removable media (floppy, CD or USB flash drive) so the user can try flashing the BIOS again. Some motherboards have a "backup" BIOS (sometimes referred to as DualBIOS boards) to recover from BIOS corruptions.
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There are at least five known viruses that attack the BIOS. Two of which were for demonstration purposes. The first one found in the wild was "Mebromi", targeting Chinese users.
The first BIOS virus was BIOS Meningitis, which instead of erasing BIOS chips it infected them. BIOS Meningitis was relatively harmless, compared to a virus like CIH.
The second BIOS virus was CIH, also known as the "Chernobyl Virus", which was able to erase flash ROM BIOS content on compatible chipsets. CIH appeared in mid-1998 and became active in April 1999. Often, infected computers could no longer boot, and people had to remove the flash ROM IC from the motherboard and reprogram it. CIH targeted the then-widespread Intel i430TX motherboard chipset and took advantage of the fact that the Windows 9x operating systems, also widespread at the time, allowed direct hardware access to all programs.
Modern systems are not vulnerable to CIH because of a variety of chipsets being used which are incompatible with the Intel i430TX chipset, and also other flash ROM IC types. There is also extra protection from accidental BIOS rewrites in the form of boot blocks which are protected from accidental overwrite or dual and quad BIOS equipped systems which may, in the event of a crash, use a backup BIOS. Also, all modern operating systems such as FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows NT-based Windows OS like Windows 2000, Windows XP and newer, do not allow user-mode programs to have direct hardware access using a hardware abstraction layer.
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As a result, as of 2008, CIH has become essentially harmless, at worst causing annoyance by infecting executable files and triggering antivirus software. Other BIOS viruses remain possible, however; since most Windows home users without Windows Vista/7's UAC run all applications with administrative privileges, a modern CIH-like virus could in principle still gain access to hardware without first using an exploit. The operating system OpenBSD prevents all users from having this access and the grsecurity patch for the Linux kernel also prevents this direct hardware access by default, the difference being an attacker requiring a much more difficult kernel level exploit or reboot of the machine.
The third BIOS virus was a technique presented by John Heasman, principal security consultant for UK-based Next-Generation Security Software. In 2006, at the Black Hat Security Conference, he showed how to elevate privileges and read physical memory, using malicious procedures that replaced normal ACPI functions stored in flash memory.
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The fourth BIOS virus was a technique called "Persistent BIOS infection." It appeared in 2009 at the CanSecWest Security Conference in Vancouver, and at the SyScan Security Conference in Singapore. Researchers Anibal Sacco and Alfredo Ortega, from Core Security Technologies, demonstrated how to insert malicious code into the decompression routines in the BIOS, allowing for nearly full control of the PC at start-up, even before the operating system is booted. The proof-of-concept does not exploit a flaw in the BIOS implementation, but only involves the normal BIOS flashing procedures. Thus, it requires physical access to the machine, or for the user to be root. Despite these requirements, Ortega underlined the profound implications of his and Sacco's discovery: "We can patch a driver to drop a fully working rootkit. We even have a little code that can remove or disable antivirus."
Mebromi is a trojan which targets computers with AwardBIOS, Microsoft Windows, and antivirus software from two Chinese companies: Rising Antivirus and Jiangmin KV Antivirus. Mebromi installs a rootkit which infects the Master boot record.
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In a December 2013 interview with "60 Minutes", Deborah Plunkett, Information Assurance Director for the US National Security Agency claimed the NSA had uncovered and thwarted a possible BIOS attack by a foreign nation state, targeting the US financial system. The program cited anonymous sources alleging it was a Chinese plot. However follow-up articles in "The Guardian," "The Atlantic," "Wired" and "The Register" refuted the NSA's claims.
Newer Intel platforms have Intel Boot Guard (IBG) technology enabled, this technology will check the BIOS digital signature at startup, and the IBG public key is fused into the PCH. End users can't disable this function.
Alternatives and successors.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) supplements the BIOS in many new machines. Initially written for the Intel Itanium architecture, UEFI is now available for x86 and Arm platforms; the specification development is driven by the Unified EFI Forum, an industry special interest group. EFI booting has been supported in only Microsoft Windows versions supporting GPT, the Linux kernel 2.6.1 and later, and macOS on Intel-based Macs. , new PC hardware predominantly ships with UEFI firmware. The architecture of the rootkit safeguard can also prevent the system from running the user's own software changes, which makes UEFI controversial as a legacy BIOS replacement in the open hardware community. Also, Windows 11 requires UEFI to boot, with the exception of IoT Enterprise editions of Windows 11. UEFI is required for devices shipping with Windows 8 and above.
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After the popular of UEFI in 2010s, the older BIOS that based on BIOS interrupt calls, was rename to "Legacy BIOS".
Other alternatives to the functionality of the "Legacy BIOS" in the x86 world include coreboot and libreboot.
Some servers and workstations use a platform-independent Open Firmware (IEEE-1275) based on the Forth programming language; it is included with Sun's SPARC computers, IBM's RS/6000 line, and other PowerPC systems such as the CHRP motherboards, along with the x86-based OLPC XO-1.
As of at least 2015, Apple has removed legacy BIOS support from the UEFI monitor in Intel-based Macs. As such, the BIOS utility no longer supports the legacy option, and prints "Legacy mode not supported on this system".
In 2017, Intel announced that it would remove legacy BIOS support by 2020. Since 2019, new Intel platform OEM PCs no longer support the legacy option. |
Bose–Einstein condensate
In condensed matter physics, a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter that is typically formed when a gas of bosons at very low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero, i.e., . Under such conditions, a large fraction of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state, at which microscopic quantum-mechanical phenomena, particularly wavefunction interference, become apparent macroscopically.
More generally, condensation refers to the appearance of macroscopic occupation of one or several states: for example, in BCS theory, a superconductor is a condensate of Cooper pairs. As such, condensation can be associated with phase transition, and the macroscopic occupation of the state is the order parameter.
Bose–Einstein condensate was first predicted, generally, in 1924–1925 by Albert Einstein, crediting a pioneering paper by Satyendra Nath Bose on the new field now known as quantum statistics. In 1995, the Bose–Einstein condensate was created by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado Boulder using rubidium atoms; later that year, Wolfgang Ketterle of MIT produced a BEC using sodium atoms. In 2001 Cornell, Wieman, and Ketterle shared the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the achievement of Bose–Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates".
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History.
Bose first sent a paper to Einstein on the quantum statistics of light quanta (now called photons), in which he derived Planck's quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics. Einstein was impressed, translated the paper himself from English to German and submitted it for Bose to the "Zeitschrift für Physik", which published it in 1924. (The Einstein manuscript, once believed to be lost, was found in a library at Leiden University in 2005.) Einstein then extended Bose's ideas to matter in two other papers. The result of their efforts is the concept of a Bose gas, governed by Bose–Einstein statistics, which describes the statistical distribution of identical particles with integer spin, now called bosons. Bosons are allowed to share a quantum state. Einstein proposed that cooling bosonic atoms to a very low temperature would cause them to fall (or "condense") into the lowest accessible quantum state, resulting in a new form of matter. Bosons include the photon, polaritons, magnons, some atoms and molecules (depending on the number of nucleons, see #Isotopes) such as atomic hydrogen, helium-4, lithium-7, rubidium-87 or strontium-84.
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In 1938, Fritz London proposed the BEC as a mechanism for superfluidity in and superconductivity.
The quest to produce a Bose–Einstein condensate in the laboratory was stimulated by a paper published in 1976 by two program directors at the National Science Foundation (William Stwalley and Lewis Nosanow), proposing to use spin-polarized atomic hydrogen to produce a gaseous BEC. This led to the immediate pursuit of the idea by four independent research groups; these were led by Isaac Silvera (University of Amsterdam), Walter Hardy (University of British Columbia), Thomas Greytak (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and David Lee (Cornell University). However, cooling atomic hydrogen turned out to be technically difficult, and Bose-Einstein condensation of atomic hydrogen was only realized in 1998.
On 5 June 1995, the first gaseous condensate was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado at Boulder NIST–JILA lab, in a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nanokelvins (nK). Shortly thereafter, Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT produced a Bose–Einstein Condensate in a gas of sodium atoms. For their achievements Cornell, Wieman, and Ketterle received the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. Bose-Einstein condensation of alkali gases is easier because they can be pre-cooled with laser cooling techniques, unlike atomic hydrogen at the time, which give a significant head start when performing the final forced evaporative cooling to cross the condensation threshold. These early studies founded the field of ultracold atoms, and hundreds of research groups around the world now routinely produce BECs of dilute atomic vapors in their labs.
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Since 1995, many other atomic species have been condensed (see #Isotopes), and BECs have also been realized using molecules, polaritons, and other quasi-particles. BECs of photons can be made, for example, in dye microcavites with wavelength-scale mirror separation, forming a two-dimensional harmonically confined photon gas with tunable chemical potential. BEC of plasmonic quasiparticles (plasmon-exciton polaritons) has been realized in periodic arrays of metal nanoparticles overlaid with dye molecules, exhibiting ultrafast sub-picosecond dynamics and long-range correlations.
Critical temperature.
This transition to BEC occurs below a critical temperature, which for a uniform three-dimensional gas consisting of non-interacting particles with no apparent internal degrees of freedom is given by
where:
Interactions shift the value, and the corrections can be calculated by mean-field theory.
This formula is derived from finding the gas degeneracy in the Bose gas using Bose–Einstein statistics.
The critical temperature depends on the density. A more concise and experimentally relevant condition involves the phase-space density formula_9, where
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is the thermal de Broglie wavelength. It is a dimensionless quantity. The transition to BEC occurs when the phase-space density is greater than critical value:
in 3D uniform space. This is equivalent to the above condition on the temperature. In a 3D harmonic potential, the critical value is instead
where formula_3 has to be understood as the peak density.
Derivation.
Ideal Bose gas.
For an ideal Bose gas we have the equation of state
where formula_15 is the per-particle volume, formula_16 is the thermal wavelength, formula_17 is the fugacity, and
It is noticeable that formula_19 is a monotonically growing function of formula_17 in formula_21, which are the only values for which the series converge.
Recognizing that the second term on the right-hand side contains the expression for the average occupation number of the fundamental state formula_22, the equation of state can be rewritten as
Because the left term on the second equation must always be positive, formula_24, and because formula_25, a stronger condition is
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which defines a transition between a gas phase and a condensed phase. On the critical region it is possible to define a critical temperature and thermal wavelength:
recovering the value indicated on the previous section. The critical values are such that if formula_29 or formula_30, we are in the presence of a Bose–Einstein condensate.
Understanding what happens with the fraction of particles on the fundamental level is crucial. As so, write the equation of state for formula_31, obtaining
So, if formula_34, the fraction formula_35, and if formula_36, the fraction formula_37. At temperatures near to absolute 0, particles tend to condense in the fundamental state, which is the state with momentum formula_38.
Experimental observation.
Superfluid helium-4.
In 1938, Pyotr Kapitsa, John Allen and Don Misener discovered that helium-4 became a new kind of fluid, now known as a superfluid, at temperatures less than 2.17 K (the lambda point). Superfluid helium has many unusual properties, including zero viscosity (the ability to flow without dissipating energy) and the existence of quantized vortices. It was quickly believed that the superfluidity was due to partial Bose–Einstein condensation of the liquid. In fact, many properties of superfluid helium also appear in gaseous condensates created by Cornell, Wieman and Ketterle (see below). Superfluid helium-4 is a liquid rather than a gas, which means that the interactions between the atoms are relatively strong; the original theory of Bose–Einstein condensation must be heavily modified in order to describe it. Bose–Einstein condensation remains, however, fundamental to the superfluid properties of helium-4. Note that helium-3, a fermion, also enters a superfluid phase (at a much lower temperature) which can be explained by the formation of bosonic Cooper pairs of two atoms (see also fermionic condensate).
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Dilute atomic gases.
The first "pure" Bose–Einstein condensate was created by Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, and co-workers at JILA on 5 June 1995. They cooled a dilute vapor of approximately two thousand rubidium-87 atoms to below 170 nK using a combination of laser cooling (a technique that won its inventors Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William D. Phillips the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics) and magnetic evaporative cooling. About four months later, an independent effort led by Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT condensed sodium-23. Ketterle's condensate had a hundred times more atoms, allowing important results such as the observation of quantum mechanical interference between two different condensates. Cornell, Wieman and Ketterle won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievements.
A group led by Randall Hulet at Rice University announced a condensate of lithium atoms only one month following the JILA work. Lithium has attractive interactions, causing the condensate to be unstable and collapse for all but a few atoms. Hulet's team subsequently showed the condensate could be stabilized by confinement quantum pressure for up to about 1000 atoms. Various isotopes have since been condensed.
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Velocity-distribution data graph.
In the image accompanying this article, the velocity-distribution data indicates the formation of a Bose–Einstein condensate out of a gas of rubidium atoms. The false colors indicate the number of atoms at each velocity, with red being the fewest and white being the most. The areas appearing white and light blue are at the lowest velocities. The peak is not infinitely narrow because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: spatially confined atoms have a minimum width velocity distribution. This width is given by the curvature of the magnetic potential in the given direction. More tightly confined directions have bigger widths in the ballistic velocity distribution. This anisotropy of the peak on the right is a purely quantum-mechanical effect and does not exist in the thermal distribution on the left. This graph served as the cover design for the 1999 textbook "Thermal Physics" by Ralph Baierlein.
Quasiparticles.
Bose–Einstein condensation also applies to quasiparticles in solids. Magnons, excitons, and polaritons have integer spin which means they are bosons that can form condensates.
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Magnons, electron spin waves, can be controlled by a magnetic field. Densities from the limit of a dilute gas to a strongly interacting Bose liquid are possible. Magnetic ordering is the analog of superfluidity. In 1999 condensation was demonstrated in antiferromagnetic , at temperatures as great as 14 K. The high transition temperature (relative to atomic gases) is due to the magnons' small mass (near that of an electron) and greater achievable density. In 2006, condensation in a ferromagnetic yttrium-iron-garnet thin film was seen even at room temperature, with optical pumping.
Excitons, electron-hole pairs, were predicted to condense at low temperature and high density by Boer et al., in 1961. Bilayer system experiments first demonstrated condensation in 2003, by Hall voltage disappearance. Fast optical exciton creation was used to form condensates in sub-kelvin in 2005 on.
Polariton condensation was first detected for exciton-polaritons in a quantum well microcavity kept at 5 K. Quasiparticle BECs have been achieved at room-temperature, for example, in microcavity-coupled organic semiconductors and plasmon-exciton polaritons in periodic arrays of metal nanoparticles coupled to dye molecules.
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In zero gravity.
In June 2020, the Cold Atom Laboratory experiment on board the International Space Station successfully created a BEC of rubidium atoms and observed them for over a second in free-fall. Although initially just a proof of function, early results showed that, in the microgravity environment of the ISS, about half of the atoms formed into a magnetically insensitive halo-like cloud around the main body of the BEC.
Models.
Bose Einstein's non-interacting gas.
Consider a collection of "N" non-interacting particles, which can each be in one of two quantum states, formula_39 and formula_40. If the two states are equal in energy, each different configuration is equally likely.
If we can tell which particle is which, there are formula_41 different configurations, since each particle can be in formula_39 or formula_40 independently. In almost all of the configurations, about half the particles are in formula_39 and the other half in formula_40. The balance is a statistical effect: the number of configurations is largest when the particles are divided equally.
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If the particles are indistinguishable, however, there are only formula_46 different configurations. If there are formula_47 particles in state formula_40, there are formula_49 particles in state formula_39. Whether any particular particle is in state formula_39 or in state formula_40 cannot be determined, so each value of formula_47 determines a unique quantum state for the whole system.
Suppose now that the energy of state formula_40 is slightly greater than the energy of state formula_39 by an amount formula_56. At temperature formula_57, a particle will have a lesser probability to be in state formula_40 by formula_59. In the distinguishable case, the particle distribution will be biased slightly towards state formula_39. But in the indistinguishable case, since there is no statistical pressure toward equal numbers, the most-likely outcome is that most of the particles will collapse into state formula_39.
In the distinguishable case, for large "N", the fraction in state formula_39 can be computed. It is the same as flipping a coin with probability proportional to formula_63 to land tails.
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In the indistinguishable case, each value of formula_47 is a single state, which has its own separate Boltzmann probability. So the probability distribution is exponential:
For large formula_66, the normalization constant formula_67 is formula_68. The expected total number of particles not in the lowest energy state, in the limit that formula_69, is equal to
It does not grow when "N" is large; it just approaches a constant. This will be a negligible fraction of the total number of particles. So a collection of enough Bose particles in thermal equilibrium will mostly be in the ground state, with only a few in any excited state, no matter how small the energy difference.
Consider now a gas of particles, which can be in different momentum states labeled formula_71. If the number of particles is less than the number of thermally accessible states, for high temperatures and low densities, the particles will all be in different states. In this limit, the gas is classical. As the density increases or the temperature decreases, the number of accessible states per particle becomes smaller, and at some point, more particles will be forced into a single state than the maximum allowed for that state by statistical weighting. From this point on, any extra particle added will go into the ground state.
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To calculate the transition temperature at any density, integrate, over all momentum states, the expression for maximum number of excited particles, formula_72:
When the integral (also known as Bose–Einstein integral) is evaluated with factors of formula_75 and formula_5 restored by dimensional analysis, it gives the critical temperature formula of the preceding section. Therefore, this integral defines the critical temperature and particle number corresponding to the conditions of negligible chemical potential formula_77. In Bose–Einstein statistics distribution, formula_77 is actually still nonzero for BECs; however, formula_77 is less than the ground state energy. Except when specifically talking about the ground state, formula_77 can be approximated for most energy or momentum states as formula_81.
Bogoliubov theory for weakly interacting gas.
Nikolay Bogoliubov considered perturbations on the limit of dilute gas, finding a finite pressure at zero temperature and positive chemical potential. This leads to corrections for the ground state. The Bogoliubov state has pressure formula_82: formula_83.
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The original interacting system can be converted to a system of non-interacting particles with a dispersion law.
Gross–Pitaevskii equation.
In some simplest cases, the state of condensed particles can be described with a nonlinear Schrödinger equation, also known as Gross–Pitaevskii or Ginzburg–Landau equation. The validity of this approach is actually limited to the case of ultracold temperatures, which fits well for the most alkali atoms experiments.
This approach originates from the assumption that the state of the BEC can be described by the unique wavefunction of the condensate formula_84. For a system of this nature, formula_85 is interpreted as the particle density, so the total number of atoms is formula_86
Provided essentially all atoms are in the condensate (that is, have condensed to the ground state), and treating the bosons using mean-field theory, the energy (E) associated with the state formula_84 is:
Minimizing this energy with respect to infinitesimal variations in formula_84, and holding the number of atoms constant, yields the Gross–Pitaevski equation (GPE) (also a non-linear Schrödinger equation):
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where:
In the case of zero external potential, the dispersion law of interacting Bose–Einstein-condensed particles is given by so-called Bogoliubov spectrum (for formula_91):
The Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) provides a relatively good description of the behavior of atomic BEC's. However, GPE does not take into account the temperature dependence of dynamical variables, and is therefore valid only for formula_91.
It is not applicable, for example, for the condensates of excitons, magnons and photons, where the critical temperature is comparable to room temperature.
Numerical solution.
The Gross-Pitaevskii equation is a partial differential equation in space and time variables. Usually it does not have analytic solution and
different numerical methods, such as split-step
Crank–Nicolson
and Fourier spectral methods, are used for its solution. There are different Fortran and C programs for its solution for contact interaction
and long-range dipolar interaction which can be freely used.
Weaknesses of Gross–Pitaevskii model.
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The Gross–Pitaevskii model of BEC is a physical approximation valid for certain classes of BECs. By construction, the GPE uses the following simplifications: it assumes that interactions between condensate particles are of the contact two-body type and also neglects anomalous contributions to self-energy. These assumptions are suitable mostly for the dilute three-dimensional condensates. If one relaxes any of these assumptions, the equation for the condensate wavefunction acquires the terms containing higher-order powers of the wavefunction. Moreover, for some physical systems the amount of such terms turns out to be infinite, therefore, the equation becomes essentially non-polynomial. The examples where this could happen are the Bose–Fermi composite condensates, effectively lower-dimensional condensates, and dense condensates and superfluid clusters and droplets. It is found that one has to go beyond the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. For example, the logarithmic term formula_94 found in the Logarithmic Schrödinger equation must be added to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation along with a Ginzburg–Sobyanin contribution to correctly determine that the speed of sound scales as the cubic root of pressure for Helium-4 at very low temperatures in close agreement with experiment.
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Other.
However, it is clear that in a general case the behaviour of Bose–Einstein condensate can be described by coupled evolution equations for condensate density, superfluid velocity and distribution function of elementary excitations. This problem was solved in 1977 by Peletminskii et al. in microscopical approach. The Peletminskii equations are valid for any finite temperatures below the critical point. Years after, in 1985, Kirkpatrick and Dorfman obtained similar equations using another microscopical approach. The Peletminskii equations also reproduce Khalatnikov hydrodynamical equations for superfluid as a limiting case.
Superfluidity of BEC and Landau criterion.
The phenomena of superfluidity of a Bose gas and superconductivity of a strongly-correlated Fermi gas (a gas of Cooper pairs) are tightly connected to Bose–Einstein condensation. Under corresponding conditions, below the temperature of phase transition, these phenomena were observed in helium-4 and different classes of superconductors. In this sense, the superconductivity is often called the superfluidity of Fermi gas. In the simplest form, the origin of superfluidity can be seen from the weakly interacting bosons model.
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Peculiar properties.
Quantized vortices.
As in many other systems, vortices can exist in BECs.
Vortices can be created, for example, by "stirring" the condensate with lasers,
rotating the confining trap,
or by rapid cooling across the phase transition.
The vortex created will be a quantum vortex with core shape determined by the interactions. Fluid circulation around any point is quantized due to the single-valued nature of the order BEC order parameter or wavefunction, that can be written in the form formula_95 where formula_96 and formula_97 are as in the cylindrical coordinate system, and formula_98 is the angular quantum number (a.k.a. the "charge" of the vortex). Since the energy of a vortex is proportional to the square of its angular momentum, in trivial topology only formula_99 vortices can exist in the steady state; Higher-charge vortices will have a tendency to split into formula_99 vortices, if allowed by the topology of the geometry.
An axially symmetric (for instance, harmonic) confining potential is commonly used for the study of vortices in BEC. To determine formula_101, the energy of formula_84 must be minimized, according to the constraint formula_95. This is usually done computationally, however, in a uniform medium, the following analytic form demonstrates the correct behavior, and is a good approximation:
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Here, formula_3 is the density far from the vortex and formula_106, where formula_107 is the healing length of the condensate.
A singly charged vortex (formula_99) is in the ground state, with its energy formula_109 given by
where formula_111 is the farthest distance from the vortices considered.(To obtain an energy which is well defined it is necessary to include this boundary formula_112.)
For multiply charged vortices (formula_113) the energy is approximated by
which is greater than that of formula_98 singly charged vortices, indicating that these multiply charged vortices are unstable to decay. Research has, however, indicated they are metastable states, so may have relatively long lifetimes.
Closely related to the creation of vortices in BECs is the generation of so-called dark solitons in one-dimensional BECs. These topological objects feature a phase gradient across their nodal plane, which stabilizes their shape even in propagation and interaction. Although solitons carry no charge and are thus prone to decay, relatively long-lived dark solitons have been produced and studied extensively.
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Attractive interactions.
Experiments led by Randall Hulet at Rice University from 1995 through 2000 showed that lithium condensates with attractive interactions could stably exist up to a critical atom number. Quench cooling the gas, they observed the condensate to grow, then subsequently collapse as the attraction overwhelmed the zero-point energy of the confining potential, in a burst reminiscent of a supernova, with an explosion preceded by an implosion.
Further work on attractive condensates was performed in 2000 by the JILA team, of Cornell, Wieman and coworkers. Their instrumentation now had better control so they used naturally "attracting" atoms of rubidium-85 (having negative atom–atom scattering length). Through Feshbach resonance involving a sweep of the magnetic field causing spin flip collisions, they lowered the characteristic, discrete energies at which rubidium bonds, making their Rb-85 atoms repulsive and creating a stable condensate. The reversible flip from attraction to repulsion stems from quantum interference among wave-like condensate atoms.
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When the JILA team raised the magnetic field strength further, the condensate suddenly reverted to attraction, imploded and shrank beyond detection, then exploded, expelling about two-thirds of its 10,000 atoms. About half of the atoms in the condensate seemed to have disappeared from the experiment altogether, not seen in the cold remnant or expanding gas cloud. Carl Wieman explained that under current atomic theory this characteristic of Bose–Einstein condensate could not be explained because the energy state of an atom near absolute zero should not be enough to cause an implosion; however, subsequent mean-field theories have been proposed to explain it. Most likely they formed molecules of two rubidium atoms; energy gained by this bond imparts velocity sufficient to leave the trap without being detected.
The process of creation of molecular Bose condensate during the sweep of the magnetic field throughout the Feshbach resonance, as well as the reverse process, are described by the exactly solvable model that can explain many experimental observations.
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Current research.
Compared to more commonly encountered states of matter, Bose–Einstein condensates are extremely fragile. The slightest interaction with the external environment can be enough to warm them past the condensation threshold, eliminating their interesting properties and forming a normal gas.
Nevertheless, they have proven useful in exploring a wide range of questions in fundamental physics, and the years since the initial discoveries by the JILA and MIT groups have seen an increase in experimental and theoretical activity.
Bose–Einstein condensates composed of a wide range of isotopes have been produced; see below.
Fundamental research.
Examples include experiments that have demonstrated interference between condensates due to wave–particle duality, the study of superfluidity and quantized vortices, the creation of bright matter wave solitons from Bose condensates confined to one dimension, and the slowing of light pulses to very low speeds using electromagnetically induced transparency. Vortices in Bose–Einstein condensates are also currently the subject of analogue gravity research, studying the possibility of modeling black holes and their related phenomena in such environments in the laboratory.
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Experimenters have also realized "optical lattices", where the interference pattern from overlapping lasers provides a periodic potential. These are used to explore the transition between a superfluid and a Mott insulator.
They are also useful in studying Bose–Einstein condensation in fewer than three dimensions, for example the Lieb–Liniger model (an the limit of strong interactions, the Tonks–Girardeau gas) in 1D and the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless transition in 2D. Indeed, a deep optical lattice allows the experimentalist to freeze the motion of the particles along one or two directions, effectively eliminating one or two dimension from the system.
Further, the sensitivity of the pinning transition of strongly interacting bosons confined in a shallow one-dimensional optical lattice originally observed by Haller has been explored via a tweaking of the primary optical lattice by a secondary weaker one. Thus for a resulting weak bichromatic optical lattice, it has been found that the pinning transition is robust against the
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introduction of the weaker secondary optical lattice.
Studies of vortices in nonuniform Bose–Einstein condensates as well as excitations of these systems by the application of moving repulsive or attractive obstacles, have also been undertaken. Within this context, the conditions for order and chaos in the dynamics of a trapped Bose–Einstein condensate have been explored by the application of moving blue and red-detuned laser beams (hitting frequencies slightly above and below the resonance frequency, respectively) via the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation.
Applications.
In 1999, Danish physicist Lene Hau led a team from Harvard University which slowed a beam of light to about 17 meters per second using a superfluid. Hau and her associates have since made a group of condensate atoms recoil from a light pulse such that they recorded the light's phase and amplitude, recovered by a second nearby condensate, in what they term "slow-light-mediated atomic matter-wave amplification" using Bose–Einstein condensates.
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Another current research interest is the creation of Bose–Einstein condensates in microgravity in order to use its properties for high precision atom interferometry. The first demonstration of a BEC in weightlessness was achieved in 2008 at a drop tower in Bremen, Germany by a consortium of researchers led by Ernst M. Rasel from Leibniz University Hannover. The same team demonstrated in 2017 the first creation of a Bose–Einstein condensate in space and it is also the subject of two upcoming experiments on the International Space Station.
Researchers in the new field of atomtronics use the properties of Bose–Einstein condensates in the emerging quantum technology of matter-wave circuits.
In 1970, BECs were proposed by Emmanuel David Tannenbaum for anti-stealth technology.
Isotopes.
Bose-Einstein condensation has mainly been observed on alkaline atoms, some of which have collisional properties particularly suitable for evaporative cooling in traps, and which where the first to laser-cooled. As of 2021, using ultra-low temperatures of or below, Bose–Einstein condensates had been obtained for a multitude of isotopes with more or less ease, mainly of alkali metal, alkaline earth metal, and lanthanide atoms (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and metastable (orthohelium)). Research was finally successful in atomic hydrogen with the aid of the newly developed method of 'evaporative cooling'.
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In contrast, the superfluid state of below is differs significantly from dilute degenerate atomic gases because the interaction between the atoms is strong. Only 8% of atoms are in the condensed fraction near absolute zero, rather than near 100% of a weakly interacting BEC.
The bosonic behavior of some of these alkaline gases appears odd at first sight, because their nuclei have half-integer total spin. It arises from the interplay of electronic and nuclear spins: at ultra-low temperatures and corresponding excitation energies, the half-integer total spin of the electronic shell (one outer electron) and half-integer total spin of the nucleus are coupled by a very weak hyperfine interaction. The total spin of the atom, arising from this coupling, is an integer value. Conversely, alkali isotopes which have an integer nuclear spin (such as and ) are fermions and can form degenerate Fermi gases, also called "Fermi condensates".
Cooling fermions to extremely low temperatures has created degenerate gases, subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. To exhibit Bose–Einstein condensation, the fermions must "pair up" to form bosonic compound particles (e.g. molecules or Cooper pairs). The first molecular condensates were created in November 2003 by the groups of Rudolf Grimm at the University of Innsbruck, Deborah S. Jin at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT. Jin quickly went on to create the first fermionic condensate, working with the same system but outside the molecular regime.
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Continuous Bose–Einstein condensation.
Limitations of evaporative cooling have restricted atomic BECs to "pulsed" operation, involving a highly inefficient duty cycle that discards more than 99% of atoms to reach BEC. Achieving continuous BEC has been a major open problem of experimental BEC research, driven by the same motivations as continuous optical laser development: high flux, high coherence matter waves produced continuously would enable new sensing applications.
Continuous BEC was achieved for the first time in 2022 with .
In solid state physics.
In 2020, researchers reported the development of superconducting BEC and that there appears to be a "smooth transition between" BEC and Bardeen–Cooper–Shrieffer regimes.
Dark matter.
P. Sikivie and Q. Yang showed that cold dark matter axions would form a Bose–Einstein condensate by thermalisation because of gravitational self-interactions. Axions have not yet been confirmed to exist. However the important search for them has been greatly enhanced with the completion of upgrades to the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) at the University of Washington in early 2018.
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In 2014, a potential dibaryon was detected at the Jülich Research Center at about 2380 MeV. The center claimed that the measurements confirm results from 2011, via a more replicable method. The particle existed for 10−23 seconds and was named d*(2380). This particle is hypothesized to consist of three up and three down quarks. It is theorized that groups of d* (d-stars) could form Bose–Einstein condensates due to prevailing low temperatures in the early universe, and that BECs made of such hexaquarks with trapped electrons could behave like dark matter. |
B (programming language)
B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
B was derived from BCPL, and its name may possibly be a contraction of BCPL. Thompson's coworker Dennis Ritchie speculated that the name might be based on Bon, an earlier, but unrelated, programming language that Thompson designed for use on Multics.
B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine-independent applications, such as system and language software. It was a typeless language, with the only data type being the underlying machine's natural memory word format, whatever that might be. Depending on the context, the word was treated either as an integer or a memory address.
As machines with ASCII processing became common, notably the DEC PDP-11 that arrived at Bell Labs, support for character data stuffed in memory words became important. The typeless nature of the language was seen as a disadvantage, which led Thompson and Ritchie to develop an expanded version of the language supporting new internal and user-defined types, which became the C programming language.
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History.
Circa 1969, Ken Thompson and later Dennis Ritchie developed B basing it mainly on the BCPL language Thompson used in the Multics project. B was essentially the BCPL system stripped of any component Thompson felt he could do without in order to make it fit within the memory capacity of the minicomputers of the time. The BCPL to B transition also included changes made to suit Thompson's preferences (mostly along the lines of reducing the number of non-whitespace characters in a typical program). Much of the typical ALGOL-like syntax of BCPL was rather heavily changed in this process. The assignment operator codice_1 reverted to the codice_2 of Rutishauser's Superplan, and the equality operator codice_2 was replaced by codice_4.
Thompson added "two-address assignment operators" using codice_5 syntax to add y to x (in C the operator is written codice_6). This syntax came from Douglas McIlroy's implementation of TMG, in which B's compiler was first implemented (and it came to TMG from ALGOL 68's codice_7 syntax). Thompson went further by inventing the increment and decrement operators (codice_8 and codice_9). Their prefix or postfix position determines whether the value is taken before or after alteration of the operand. This innovation was not in the earliest versions of B. According to Dennis Ritchie, people often assumed that they were created for the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes of the DEC PDP-11, but this is historically impossible as the machine didn't exist when B was first developed.
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The semicolon version of the for loop was borrowed by Ken Thompson from the work of Stephen Johnson.
B is typeless, or more precisely has one data type: the computer word. Most operators (e.g. codice_10, codice_11, codice_12, codice_13) treated this as an integer, but others treated it as a memory address to be dereferenced. In many other ways it looked a lot like an early version of C. There are a few library functions, including some that vaguely resemble functions from the standard I/O library in C.
In Thompson's words: "B and the old old C were very very similar languages except for all the types [in C]".
Early implementations were for the DEC PDP-7 and PDP-11 minicomputers using early Unix, and Honeywell 36-bit mainframes running the operating system GCOS. The earliest PDP-7 implementations compiled to threaded code, and Ritchie wrote a compiler using TMG which produced machine code. In 1970 a PDP-11 was acquired and threaded code was used for the port; an assembler, , and the B language itself were written in B to bootstrap the computer. An early version of yacc was produced with this PDP-11 configuration. Ritchie took over maintenance during this period.
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The typeless nature of B made sense on the Honeywell, PDP-7 and many older computers, but was a problem on the PDP-11 because it was difficult to elegantly access the character data type that the PDP-11 and most modern computers fully support. Starting in 1971 Ritchie made changes to the language while converting its compiler to produce machine code, most notably adding data typing for variables. During 1971 and 1972 B evolved into "New B" (NB) and then C.
B is almost extinct, having been superseded by the C language. However, it continues to see use on GCOS mainframes ()
and on certain embedded systems () for a variety of reasons: limited hardware in small systems, extensive libraries, tooling, licensing cost issues, and simply being good enough for the job. The highly influential AberMUD was originally written in B.
Examples.
The following examples are from the "Users' Reference to B" by Ken Thompson:
/* The following function will print a non-negative number, n, to
the base b, where 2<=b<=10. This routine uses the fact that
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in the ASCII character set, the digits 0 to 9 have sequential
code values. */
printn(n,b) {
extrn putchar;
auto a;
/* Wikipedia note: the auto keyword declares a variable with
automatic storage (lifetime is function scope), not
"automatic typing" as in C++11. */
if(a=n/b) /* assignment, not test for equality */
printn(a, b); /* recursive */
putchar(n%b + '0');
/* The following program will calculate the constant e-2 to about
4000 decimal digits, and print it 50 characters to the line in
groups of 5 characters. The method is simple output conver-
sion of the expansion
1/2! + 1/3! + ... = .111...
where the bases of the digits are 2, 3, 4, ... */
main() {
extrn putchar, n, v;
auto i, c, col, a;
i = col = 0;
while(i<n)
v[i++] = 1;
while(col<2*n) {
a = n+1;
c = i = 0;
while(i<n) {
c =+ v[i]*10;
v[i++] = c%a;
c =/ a--;
putchar(c+'0');
if(!(++col%5))
putchar(col%50?' ':'*n');
putchar('*n*n');
v[2000];
n 2000; |
Beer–Lambert law
The Beer–Bouguer–Lambert (BBL) extinction law is an empirical relationship describing the attenuation in intensity of a radiation beam passing through a macroscopically homogenous medium with which it interacts. Formally, it states that the intensity of radiation decays exponentially in the absorbance of the medium, and that said absorbance is proportional to the length of beam passing through the medium, the concentration of interacting matter along that path, and a constant representing said matter's propensity to interact.
The extinction law's primary application is in chemical analysis, where it underlies the Beer–Lambert law, commonly called Beer's law. Beer's law states that a beam of visible light passing through a chemical solution of fixed geometry experiences absorption proportional to the solute concentration. Other applications appear in physical optics, where it quantifies astronomical extinction and the absorption of photons, neutrons, or rarefied gases.
Forms of the BBL law date back to the mid-eighteenth century, but it only took its modern form during the early twentieth.
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History.
The first work towards the BBL law began with astronomical observations Pierre Bouguer performed in the early eighteenth century and published in 1729. Bouguer needed to compensate for the refraction of light by the earth's atmosphere, and found it necessary to measure the local height of the atmosphere. The latter, he sought to obtain through variations in the observed intensity of known stars. When calibrating this effect, Bouguer discovered that light intensity had an exponential dependence on length traveled through the atmosphere (in Bouguer's terms, a geometric progression).
Bouguer's work was then popularized in Johann Heinrich Lambert's "Photometria" in 1760. Lambert expressed the law, which states that the loss of light intensity when it propagates in a medium is directly proportional to intensity and path length, in a mathematical form quite similar to that used in modern physics. Lambert began by assuming that the intensity of light traveling into an absorbing body would be given by the differential equation formula_1 which is compatible with Bouguer's observations. The constant of proportionality was often termed the "optical density" of the body. As long as is constant along a distance , the exponential attenuation law, formula_2 follows from integration.
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In 1852, August Beer noticed that colored solutions also appeared to exhibit a similar attenuation relation. In his analysis, Beer does not discuss Bouguer and Lambert's prior work, writing in his introduction that "Concerning the absolute magnitude of the absorption that a particular ray of light suffers during its propagation through an absorbing medium, there is no information available." Beer may have omitted reference to Bouguer's work because there is a subtle physical difference between color absorption in solutions and astronomical contexts. Solutions are homogeneous and do not scatter light at common analytical wavelengths (ultraviolet, visible, or infrared), except at entry and exit. Thus light within a solution is reasonably approximated as due to absorption alone. In Bouguer's context, atmospheric dust or other inhomogeneities could also scatter light away from the detector. Modern texts combine the two laws because scattering and absorption have the same effect. Thus a scattering coefficient and an absorption coefficient can be combined into a total extinction coefficient .
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Importantly, Beer also seems to have conceptualized his result in terms of a given thickness' opacity, writing "If is the coefficient (fraction) of diminution, then this coefficient (fraction) will have the value for double this thickness." Although this geometric progression is mathematically equivalent to the modern law, modern treatments instead emphasize the logarithm of , which clarifies that concentration and path length have equivalent effects on the absorption. An early, possibly the first, modern formulation was given by Robert Luther and Andreas Nikolopulos in 1913.
Mathematical formulations.
There are several equivalent formulations of the BBL law, depending on the precise choice of measured quantities. All of them state that, provided that the physical state is held constant, the extinction process is linear in the intensity of radiation and amount of radiatively-active matter, a fact sometimes called the fundamental law of extinction. Many of them then connect the quantity of radiatively-active matter to a length traveled and a concentration or number density . The latter two are related by Avogadro's number: .
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A collimated beam (directed radiation) with cross-sectional area will encounter particles (on average) during its travel. However, not all of these particles interact with the beam. Propensity to interact is a material-dependent property, typically summarized in absorptivity or scattering cross-section . These almost exhibit another Avogadro-type relationship: . The factor of appears because physicists tend to use natural logarithms and chemists decadal logarithms.
Beam intensity can also be described in terms of multiple variables: the intensity or radiant flux . In the case of a collimated beam, these are related by , but is often used in non-collimated contexts. The ratio of intensity (or flux) in to out is sometimes summarized as a transmittance coefficient .
When considering an extinction law, dimensional analysis can verify the consistency of the variables, as logarithms (being nonlinear) must always be dimensionless.
Formulation.
The simplest formulation of Beer's relates the optical attenuation of a physical material containing a single attenuating species of uniform concentration to the optical path length through the sample and absorptivity of the species. This expression is:formula_3The quantities so equated are defined to be the absorbance , which depends on the logarithm base. The Naperian absorbance is then given by and satisfies formula_4
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If multiple species in the material interact with the radiation, then their absorbances add. Thus a slightly more general formulation is that formula_5where the sum is over all possible radiation-interacting ("translucent") species, and indexes those species.
In situations where length may vary significantly, absorbance is sometimes summarized in terms of an attenuation coefficient formula_6
In atmospheric science and radiation shielding applications, the attenuation coefficient may vary significantly through an inhomogenous material. In those situations, the most general form of the Beer–Lambert law states that the total attenuation can be obtained by integrating the attenuation coefficient over small slices of the beamline: formula_7These formulations then reduce to the simpler versions when there is only one active species and the attenuation coefficients are constant.
Derivation.
There are two factors that determine the degree to which a medium containing particles will attenuate a light beam: the number of particles encountered by the light beam, and the degree to which each particle extinguishes the light.
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Assume that a beam of light enters a material sample. Define as an axis parallel to the direction of the beam. Divide the material sample into thin slices, perpendicular to the beam of light, with thickness sufficiently small that one particle in a slice cannot obscure another particle in the same slice when viewed along the direction. The radiant flux of the light that emerges from a slice is reduced, compared to that of the light that entered, by formula_8 where is the (Napierian) attenuation coefficient, which yields the following first-order linear, ordinary differential equation:formula_9
The attenuation is caused by the photons that did not make it to the other side of the slice because of scattering or absorption. The solution to this differential equation is obtained by multiplying the integrating factorformula_10throughout to obtainformula_11which simplifies due to the product rule (applied backwards) toformula_12
Integrating both sides and solving for for a material of real thickness , with the incident radiant flux upon the slice formula_13 and the transmitted radiant flux formula_14 givesformula_15and finallyformula_16
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Since the decadic attenuation coefficient is related to the (Napierian) attenuation coefficient by formula_17 we also haveformula_18
To describe the attenuation coefficient in a way independent of the number densities of the attenuating species of the material sample, one introduces the attenuation cross section formula_19 has the dimension of an area; it expresses the likelihood of interaction between the particles of the beam and the particles of the species in the material sample:formula_20
One can also use the molar attenuation coefficients formula_21 where is the Avogadro constant, to describe the attenuation coefficient in a way independent of the amount concentrations formula_22 of the attenuating species of the material sample:formula_23
Validity.
Under certain conditions the Beer–Lambert law fails to maintain a linear relationship between attenuation and concentration of analyte. These deviations are classified into three categories:
There are at least six conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for the Beer–Lambert law to be valid. These are:
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If any of these conditions are not fulfilled, there will be deviations from the Beer–Lambert law.
The law tends to break down at very high concentrations, especially if the material is highly scattering. Absorbance within range of 0.2 to 0.5 is ideal to maintain linearity in the Beer–Lambert law. If the radiation is especially intense, nonlinear optical processes can also cause variances. The main reason, however, is that the concentration dependence is in general non-linear and Beer's law is valid only under certain conditions as shown by derivation below. For strong oscillators and at high concentrations the deviations are stronger. If the molecules are closer to each other interactions can set in. These interactions can be roughly divided into physical and chemical interactions. Physical interaction do not alter the polarizability of the molecules as long as the interaction is not so strong that light and molecular quantum state intermix (strong coupling), but cause the attenuation cross sections to be non-additive via electromagnetic coupling. Chemical interactions in contrast change the polarizability and thus absorption.
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In solids, attenuation is usually an addition of absorption coefficient formula_24 (creation of electron-hole pairs) or scattering (for example Rayleigh scattering if the scattering centers are much smaller than the incident wavelength). Also note that for some systems we can put formula_25 (1 over inelastic mean free path) in place of
Applications.
In plasma physics.
The BBL extinction law also arises as a solution to the BGK equation.
Chemical analysis by spectrophotometry.
The Beer–Lambert law can be applied to the analysis of a mixture by spectrophotometry, without the need for extensive pre-processing of the sample. An example is the determination of bilirubin in blood plasma samples. The spectrum of pure bilirubin is known, so the molar attenuation coefficient is known. Measurements of decadic attenuation coefficient are made at one wavelength that is nearly unique for bilirubin and at a second wavelength in order to correct for possible interferences. The amount concentration is then given by
formula_26
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For a more complicated example, consider a mixture in solution containing two species at amount concentrations and . The decadic attenuation coefficient at any wavelength is, given by
formula_27
Therefore, measurements at two wavelengths yields two equations in two unknowns and will suffice to determine the amount concentrations and as long as the molar attenuation coefficients of the two components, and are known at both wavelengths. This two system equation can be solved using Cramer's rule. In practice it is better to use linear least squares to determine the two amount concentrations from measurements made at more than two wavelengths. Mixtures containing more than two components can be analyzed in the same way, using a minimum of wavelengths for a mixture containing components.
The law is used widely in infra-red spectroscopy and near-infrared spectroscopy for analysis of polymer degradation and oxidation (also in biological tissue) as well as to measure the concentration of various compounds in different food samples. The carbonyl group attenuation at about 6 micrometres can be detected quite easily, and degree of oxidation of the polymer calculated.
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In-atmosphere astronomy.
The Bouguer–Lambert law may be applied to describe the attenuation of solar or stellar radiation as it travels through the atmosphere. In this case, there is scattering of radiation as well as absorption. The optical depth for a slant path is , where refers to a vertical path, is called the relative airmass, and for a plane-parallel atmosphere it is determined as where is the zenith angle corresponding to the given path. The Bouguer-Lambert law for the atmosphere is usually written
formula_28
where each is the optical depth whose subscript identifies the source of the absorption or scattering it describes:
is the "optical mass" or "airmass factor", a term approximately equal (for small and moderate values of ) to where is the observed object's zenith angle (the angle measured from the direction perpendicular to the Earth's surface at the observation site). This equation can be used to retrieve , the aerosol optical thickness, which is necessary for the correction of satellite images and also important in accounting for the role of aerosols in climate. |
The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys are an American rock band formed in Hawthorne, California, in 1961. The group's original lineup consisted of brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and their friend Al Jardine. Distinguished by their vocal harmonies, adolescent-oriented lyrics, and musical ingenuity, they are one of the most influential acts of the rock era. The group drew on the music of older pop vocal groups, 1950s rock and roll, and black R&B to create their unique sound. Under Brian's direction, they often incorporated classical or jazz elements and unconventional recording techniques in innovative ways.
The Beach Boys formed as a garage band centered on Brian's songwriting and managed by the Wilsons' father, Murry. In 1963, they enjoyed their first national hit with "Surfin' U.S.A.", beginning a string of top-ten singles that reflected a southern California youth culture of surfing, cars, and romance, dubbed the "California sound". They were one of the few American rock bands to sustain their commercial standing during the British Invasion. Starting with 1965's "The Beach Boys Today!", they abandoned beachgoing themes for more personal lyrics and ambitious orchestrations. In 1966, the "Pet Sounds" album and "Good Vibrations" single raised the group's prestige as rock innovators; both are now widely considered to be among the greatest and most influential works in popular music history. After scrapping the "Smile" album in 1967, Brian gradually ceded control of the group to his bandmates.
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In the late 1960s, the group's commercial momentum faltered in the U.S., and they were widely dismissed by the early rock music press before undergoing a rebranding in the early 1970s. Carl took over as "de facto" leader until the mid-1970s, when the band responded to the growing success of their live shows and greatest hits compilations by transitioning into an oldies act. Dennis drowned in 1983, and Brian soon became estranged from the group. Following Carl's death from lung cancer in 1998, the band granted Love legal rights to tour under the group's name. In the early 2010s, the surviving original members briefly reunited for the band's 50th anniversary tour. Currently, Brian and Jardine do not perform with Love's edition of the Beach Boys, but remain official members of the band.
The Beach Boys are one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful bands of all time, selling over 100 million records worldwide. They helped legitimize popular music as a recognized art form, and influenced the development of music genres and movements such as psychedelia, power pop, progressive rock, punk, alternative, and lo-fi. Between the 1960s and 2020s, the group had 37 songs reach the U.S. Top 40 of the "Billboard" Hot 100 (the most by an American band), with four topping the chart. In 2004, the group was ranked number 12 on "Rolling Stone"s list of the greatest artists of all time. Many critics' polls have ranked "Today!", "Pet Sounds", "Smiley Smile" (1967), "Sunflower" (1970), and "Surf's Up" (1971) and "The Beach Boys Love You" (1977) among the finest albums in history. The founding members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Other members during the band's history have been David Marks, Bruce Johnston, Blondie Chaplin, and Ricky Fataar.
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History.
1958–1961: Formation.
At the time of his 16th birthday on June 20, 1958, Brian Wilson shared a bedroom with his brothers, Dennis and Carlaged 13 and 11, respectivelyin their family home in Hawthorne. He had watched his father Murry Wilson play piano, and had listened intently to the harmonies of vocal groups such as the Four Freshmen. After dissecting songs such as "Ivory Tower" and "Good News", Brian would teach family members how to sing the background harmonies. For his birthday that year, Brian received a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He learned how to overdub, using his vocals and those of Carl and their mother. Brian played piano, while Carl and David Marks, an eleven-year-old longtime neighbor, played guitars that each had received as Christmas presents.
Soon Brian and Carl were avidly listening to Johnny Otis' KFOX radio show. Inspired by the simple structure and vocals of the rhythm and blues songs he heard, Brian changed his piano-playing style and started writing songs. Family gatherings brought the Wilsons in contact with cousin Mike Love. Brian taught Love's sister Maureen and a friend harmonies. Later, Brian, Love and two friends performed at Hawthorne High School. Brian also knew Al Jardine, a high school classmate. Brian suggested to Jardine that they team up with his cousin and brother Carl. Love gave the fledgling band its name: "The Pendletones", a pun on "Pendleton", a brand of woollen shirt popular at the time. Dennis was the only avid surfer in the group, and he suggested that the group write songs that celebrated the sport and the lifestyle that it had inspired in Southern California. Brian finished the song, titled "Surfin", and with Mike Love, wrote "Surfin' Safari".
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Murry Wilson, who was an occasional songwriter, arranged for the Pendletones to meet his publisher Hite Morgan. He said: "Finally, [Hite] agreed to hear it, and Mrs. Morgan said 'Drop everything, we're going to record your song. I think it's good.' And she's the one responsible." On September 15, 1961, the band recorded a demo of "Surfin with the Morgans. A more professional recording was made on October 3, at World Pacific Studio in Hollywood. David Marks was not present at the session as he was in school that day. Murry brought the demos to Herb Newman, owner of Candix Records and Era Records, and he signed the group on December 8. When the single was released a few weeks later, the band found that they had been renamed "the Beach Boys". Candix wanted to name the group the Surfers until Russ Regan, a young promoter with Era Records, noted that there already existed a group by that name. He suggested calling them the Beach Boys. "Surfin was a regional success for the West Coast, and reached number 75 on the national "Billboard" Hot 100 chart.
1962–1967: Peak years.
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"Surfin' Safari", "Surfin' U.S.A.", "Surfer Girl", and "Little Deuce Coupe".
By this time the de facto manager of the Beach Boys, Murry landed the group's first paying gig (for which they earned $300) on New Year's Eve, 1961, at the Ritchie Valens Memorial Dance in Long Beach. In their early public appearances, the band wore heavy wool jacket-like shirts that local surfers favored before switching to their trademark striped shirts and white pants (a look that was taken directly from the Kingston Trio). All five members sang, with Brian playing bass, Dennis playing drums, Carl playing lead guitar, and Al Jardine playing rhythm guitar, while Mike Love was the main singer and occasionally played saxophone. In early 1962, Morgan requested that some of the members add vocals to a couple of instrumental tracks that he had recorded with other musicians. This led to the creation of the short-lived group Kenny & the Cadets, which Brian led under the pseudonym "Kenny". The other members were Carl, Jardine, and the Wilsons' mother Audree. In February, Jardine left the Beach Boys and was replaced by David Marks on rhythm guitar. A common misconception is that Jardine left to focus on dental school. In reality, Jardine did not even apply to dental school until 1964, and the reason he left in February 1962 was due to creative differences and his belief that the newly-formed group would not be a commercial success.
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After being turned down by Dot and Liberty, the Beach Boys signed a seven-year contract with Capitol Records. This was at the urging of Capitol executive and staff producer Nick Venet who signed the group, seeing them as the "teenage gold" he had been scouting for. On June 4, 1962, the Beach Boys debuted on Capitol with their second single, "Surfin' Safari" backed with "409". The release prompted national coverage in the June 9 issue of "Billboard", which praised Love's lead vocal and said the song had potential. "Surfin' Safari" rose to number 14 and found airplay in New York and Phoenix, a surprise for the label.
The Beach Boys' first album, "Surfin' Safari", was released in October 1962. It was different from other rock albums of the time in that it consisted almost entirely of original songs, primarily written by Brian with Mike Love and friend Gary Usher. Another unusual feature of the Beach Boys was that, although they were marketed as "surf music", their repertoire bore little resemblance to the music of other surf bands, which was mainly instrumental and incorporated heavy use of spring reverb. For this reason, some of the Beach Boys' early local performances had young audience members throwing vegetables at the band, believing that the group were poseurs.
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In January 1963, the Beach Boys recorded their first top-ten single, "Surfin' U.S.A.", which began their long run of highly successful recording efforts. It was during the sessions for this single that Brian made the production decision from that point on to use double tracking on the group's vocals, resulting in a deeper and more resonant sound. The album of the same name followed in March and reached number 2 on the "Billboard" charts. Its success propelled the group into a nationwide spotlight, and was vital to launching surf music as a national craze, albeit the Beach Boys' vocal approach to the genre, not the original instrumental style pioneered by Dick Dale. Biographer Luis Sanchez highlights the "Surfin' U.S.A." single as a turning point for the band, "creat[ing] a direct passage to California life for a wide teenage audience ... [and] a distinct Southern California sensibility that exceeded its conception as such to advance right to the front of American consciousness". Jardine returned in spring 1963 so Brian could make fewer touring appearances. Issues between Marks, his parents, and manager/the Wilsons' father Murry led Marks to quit in October 1963.
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Throughout 1963, and for the next few years, Brian produced a variety of singles for outside artists. Among these were the Honeys, a surfer trio that comprised sisters Diane and Marilyn Rovell with cousin Ginger Blake. Brian was convinced that they could be a successful female counterpart to the Beach Boys, and he produced a number of singles for them, although they could not replicate the Beach Boys' popularity. He also attended some of Phil Spector's sessions at Gold Star Studios. His creative and songwriting interests were revamped upon hearing the Ronettes' 1963 song "Be My Baby", which was produced by Spector. The first time he heard the song was while driving, and was so overwhelmed that he had to pull over to the side of the road and analyze the chorus. Later, he reflected: "I was unable to really think as a producer up until the time where I really got familiar with Phil Spector's work. That was when I started to design the experience to be a record rather than just a song."
"Surfer Girl" marked the first time the group used outside musicians on a substantial portion of an LP. Many of them were the musicians Spector used for his Wall of Sound productions. Only a month after "Surfer Girl"'s release the group's fourth album "Little Deuce Coupe" was issued. To close 1963, the band released a standalone Christmas-themed single "Little Saint Nick", backed with an a cappella rendition of the scriptural song "The Lord's Prayer". The A-side peaked at number 3 on the US "Billboard" Christmas chart.
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British Invasion, "Shut Down Volume 2", "All Summer Long", and "Christmas Album".
The surf music craze, along with the careers of nearly all surf acts, was slowly replaced by the British Invasion. Following a successful Australasian tour in January and February 1964, the Beach Boys returned home to face their new competition, the Beatles. Both groups shared the same record label in the US, and Capitol's support for the Beach Boys immediately began waning. Although it generated a top-five single in "Fun Fun Fun", the group's fifth album, "Shut Down Volume 2", became their first since "Surfin' Safari" not to reach the US top-ten. This caused Murry to fight for the band at the label more than before, often visiting their offices without warning to "twist executive arms". Carl said that Phil Spector "was Brian's favorite kind of rock; he liked [him] better than the early Beatles stuff. He loved the Beatles' later music when they evolved and started making intelligent, masterful music, but before that Phil was it." According to Mike Love, Carl followed the Beatles closer than anyone else in the band, while Brian was the most "rattled" by the Beatles and felt tremendous pressure to "keep pace" with them. For Brian, the Beatles ultimately "eclipsed a lot [of what] we'd worked for ... [they] eclipsed the whole music world".
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Brian wrote his last surf song for nearly four years, "Don't Back Down", in April 1964. That month, during recording of the single "I Get Around", the band dismissed Murry as their manager. He remained in close contact with the group, offering unsolicited advice on their business decisions. When "I Get Around" was released in May, it would climb to number 1 in the US and Canada, their first single to do so (also reaching the top-ten in Sweden and the UK), proving that the Beach Boys could compete with contemporary British pop groups. "I Get Around" and "Don't Back Down" both appeared on the band's sixth album "All Summer Long", released in July 1964 and reaching number 4 in the US. "All Summer Long" introduced exotic textures to the Beach Boys' sound exemplified by the piccolos and xylophones of its title track. The album was a swan-song to the surf and car music the Beach Boys built their commercial standing upon. Later albums took a different stylistic and lyrical path. Before this, a live album, "Beach Boys Concert", was released in October to a four-week chart stay at number 1, containing a set list of previously recorded songs and covers that they had not yet recorded.
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In June 1964, Brian recorded the bulk of "The Beach Boys' Christmas Album" with a forty-one-piece studio orchestra in collaboration with Four Freshmen arranger Dick Reynolds. The album was a response to Phil Spector's "A Christmas Gift for You" (1963). Released in December, the Beach Boys' album was divided between five new, original Christmas-themed songs, and seven reinterpretations of traditional Christmas songs. It would be regarded as one of the finest holiday albums of the rock era. One single from the album, "The Man with All the Toys", was released, peaking at number 6 on the US "Billboard" Christmas chart. On October 29, the Beach Boys performed for "The T.A.M.I. Show", a concert film intended to bring together a wide range of musicians for a one-off performance. The result was released to movie theaters one month later.
"Today!", "Summer Days", and "Party!".
By the end of 1964, the stress of road travel, writing, and producing became too much for Brian. On December 23, while on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston, he suffered a panic attack. In January 1965, he announced his withdrawal from touring to concentrate entirely on songwriting and record production. For the last few days of 1964 and into early 1965, session musician and up-and-coming solo artist Glen Campbell agreed to temporarily serve as Brian's replacement in concert. Carl took over as the band's musical director onstage. Now a full-time studio artist, Brian wanted to move the Beach Boys beyond their surf aesthetic, believing that their image was antiquated and distracting the public from his talents as a producer and songwriter. Musically, he said he began to "take the things I learned from Phil Spector and use more instruments whenever I could. I doubled up on basses and tripled up on keyboards, which made everything sound bigger and deeper."
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Released in March 1965, "The Beach Boys Today!" marked the first time the group experimented with the "album-as-art" form. The tracks on side one feature an uptempo sound that contrasts side two, which consists mostly of emotional ballads. Music writer Scott Schinder referenced its "suite-like structure" as an early example of the rock album format being used to make a cohesive artistic statement. Brian also established his new lyrical approach toward the autobiographical; journalist Nick Kent wrote that the subjects of Brian's songs "were suddenly no longer simple happy souls harmonizing their sun-kissed innocence and dying devotion to each other over a honey-coated backdrop of surf and sand. Instead, they'd become highly vulnerable, slightly neurotic and riddled with telling insecurities." In the book "Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop", Bob Stanley remarked that "Brian was aiming for Johnny Mercer but coming up proto-indie." In 2012, the album was voted 271 on "Rolling Stone" magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
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In April 1965, Campbell's own career success pulled him from touring with the group. Columbia Records staff producer Bruce Johnston was asked to locate a replacement for Campbell; having failed to find one, Johnston himself became a full-time member of the band on May 19, 1965. With Johnston's arrival, Brian now had a sixth voice he could work with in the band's vocal arrangements, with the June 4 vocal sessions for "California Girls" being Johnston's first recording session with the Beach Boys. "California Girls" was included on the band's next album "Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)" and eventually charted at number 3 in the US as the second single from the album, while the album itself went to number 2. The first single from "Summer Days" had been a reworked arrangement of "Help Me, Rhonda", which became the band's second number 1 US single in the spring of 1965. For contractual reasons, owing to his previous deal with Columbia Records, Johnston was not able to be credited or pictured on Beach Boys records until 1967.
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To appease Capitol's demands for a Beach Boys LP for the 1965 Christmas season, Brian conceived "Beach Boys' Party!", a live-in-the-studio album consisting mostly of acoustic covers of 1950s rock and R&B songs, in addition to covers of three Beatles songs, Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'", and idiosyncratic rerecordings of the group's earlier songs. The album was an early precursor of the "unplugged" trend. It also included a cover of the Regents' song "Barbara Ann", which unexpectedly reached number 2 when released as a single several weeks later. In November, the group released another top-twenty single, "The Little Girl I Once Knew". It was considered the band's most experimental statement thus far. The single continued Brian's ambitions for daring arrangements, featuring unexpected tempo changes and numerous false endings. With the exception of their 1963 and 1964 Christmas singles ("Little Saint Nick" and "The Man with All the Toys") it was the group's lowest charting single on the "Billboard" Hot 100 since "Ten Little Indians" in 1962, peaking at number 20. According to Luis Sanchez, in 1965, Bob Dylan was "rewriting the rules for pop success" with his music and image, and it was at this juncture that Wilson "led The Beach Boys into a transitional phase in an effort to win the pop terrain that had been thrown up for grabs".
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"Pet Sounds".
Wilson collaborated with jingle writer Tony Asher for several of the songs on the album "Pet Sounds", a refinement of the themes and ideas that were introduced in "Today!". In some ways, the music was a jarring departure from their earlier style. Jardine explained that "it took us quite a while to adjust to [the new material] because it wasn't music you could necessarily dance to—it was more like music you could make love to". In "The Journal on the Art of Record Production", Marshall Heiser writes that "Pet Sounds" "diverges from previous Beach Boys' efforts in several ways: its sound field has a greater sense of depth and 'warmth;' the songs employ even more inventive use of harmony and chord voicings; the prominent use of percussion is a key feature (as opposed to driving drum backbeats); whilst the orchestrations, at times, echo the quirkiness of 'exotica' bandleader Les Baxter, or the 'cool' of Burt Bacharach, more so than Spector's teen fanfares".
For "Pet Sounds", Brian desired to make "a complete statement", similar to what he believed the Beatles had done with their newest album "Rubber Soul", released in December 1965. Brian was immediately enamored with the album, given the impression that it had no filler tracks, a feature that was mostly unheard of at a time when 45 rpm singles were considered more noteworthy than full-length LPs. He later said: "It didn't make me want to copy them but to be as good as them. I didn't want to do the same kind of music, but on the same level." Thanks to mutual connections, Brian was introduced to the Beatles' former press officer Derek Taylor, who was subsequently employed as the Beach Boys' publicist. Responding to Brian's request to reinvent the band's image, Taylor devised a promotion campaign with the tagline "Brian Wilson is a genius", a belief Taylor sincerely held. Taylor's prestige was crucial in offering a credible perspective to those on the outside, and his efforts are widely recognized as instrumental in the album's success in Britain.
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Released on May 16, 1966, "Pet Sounds" was widely influential and raised the band's prestige as an innovative rock group. Early reviews for the album in the US ranged from negative to tentatively positive, and its sales numbered approximately 500,000 units, a drop-off from the run of albums that immediately preceded it. It was assumed that Capitol considered "Pet Sounds" a risk, appealing more to an older demographic than the younger, female audience upon which the Beach Boys had built their commercial standing. Within two months, the label capitulated by releasing the group's first greatest hits compilation album, "Best of the Beach Boys", which was quickly certified gold by the RIAA. By contrast, "Pet Sounds" met a highly favorable critical response in Britain, where it reached number 2 and remained among the top-ten positions for six months. Responding to the hype, "Melody Maker" ran a feature in which many pop musicians were asked whether they believed that the album was truly revolutionary and progressive, or "as sickly as peanut butter". The author concluded that "the record's impact on artists and the men behind the artists has been considerable".
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"Good Vibrations" and "Smile".
Throughout the summer of 1966, Brian concentrated on finishing the group's next single, "Good Vibrations". Instead of working on whole songs with clear large-scale syntactical structures, he limited himself to recording short interchangeable fragments (or "modules"). Through the method of tape splicing, each fragment could then be assembled into a linear sequence, allowing any number of larger structures and divergent moods to be produced at a later time. Coming at a time when pop singles were usually recorded in under two hours, it was one of the most complex pop productions ever undertaken, with sessions for the song stretching over several months in four major Hollywood studios. It was also the most expensive single ever recorded to that point, with production costs estimated to be in the tens of thousands.
In the midst of "Good Vibrations" sessions, Wilson invited session musician and songwriter Van Dyke Parks to collaborate as lyricist for the Beach Boys' next album project, soon titled "Smile". Parks agreed. Wilson and Parks intended "Smile" to be a continuous suite of songs linked both thematically and musically, with the main songs linked together by small vocal pieces and instrumental segments that elaborated on the major songs' musical themes. It was explicitly American in style and subject, a conscious reaction to the overwhelming British dominance of popular music at the time. Some of the music incorporated chanting, cowboy songs, explorations in Indian and Hawaiian music, jazz, classical tone poems, cartoon sound effects, "musique concrète", and yodeling. "Saturday Evening Post" writer Jules Siegel recalled that, on one October evening, Brian announced to his wife and friends that he was "writing a teenage symphony to God".
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Recording for "Smile" lasted about a year, from mid-1966 to mid-1967, and followed the same modular production approach as "Good Vibrations". Concurrently, Wilson planned many different multimedia side projects, such as a sound effects collage, a comedy album, and a "health food" album. Capitol did not support all these ideas, which led to the Beach Boys' desire to form their own label, Brother Records. According to biographer Steven Gaines, Wilson employed his newfound "best friend" David Anderle as head of the label.
Throughout 1966, EMI flooded the UK market with Beach Boys albums not yet released there, including "Beach Boys' Party!", "The Beach Boys Today!" and "Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)", while "Best of the Beach Boys" was number 2 there for several weeks at the end of the year.<ref name="Mawer/OCC"></ref> Over the final quarter of 1966, the Beach Boys were the highest-selling album act in the UK, where for the first time in three years American artists broke the chart dominance of British acts. In 1971, "Cue" magazine wrote that, from mid-1966 to late-1967, the Beach Boys "were among the vanguard in practically every aspect of the counter culture".
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Released on October 10, 1966, "Good Vibrations" was the Beach Boys' third US number 1 single, reaching the top of the "Billboard" Hot 100 in December, and became their first number 1 in Britain. That month, the record was their first single certified gold by the RIAA. It came to be widely acclaimed as one of the greatest masterpieces of rock music. In December 1966, the Beach Boys were voted the top band in the world in the "NME"s annual readers' poll, ahead of the Beatles, the Walker Brothers, the Rolling Stones, and the Four Tops.
Throughout the first half of 1967, the release date for "Smile" was repeatedly postponed as Brian continuously tinkered with the recordings, experimenting with different takes and mixes, and appeared unable or unwilling to supply finished versions of songs. Meanwhile, he began to suffer from delusions and paranoia, believing on one occasion that the would-be album track "" caused a building to burn down. On January 3, 1967, Carl Wilson refused to be drafted for military service, leading to indictment and criminal prosecution, which he challenged as a conscientious objector. The FBI arrested him in April, and it took several years for courts to resolve the matter.
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After months of recording and media hype, "Smile" was shelved for personal, technical, and legal reasons. A February 1967 lawsuit seeking $255,000 (equivalent to $ in ) was launched against Capitol Records over neglected royalty payments. Within the lawsuit was an attempt to terminate the band's contract with Capitol before its November 1969 expiry. Many of Wilson's associates, including Parks and Anderle, disassociated themselves from the group by April 1967. Brian later said: "Time can be spent in the studio to the point where you get so next to it, you don't know where you are with it—you decide to just chuck it for a while."
In the decades following "Smile"s non-release, it became the subject of intense speculation and mystique and the most legendary unreleased album in pop music history. Many of the album's advocates believe that had it been released, it would have altered the group's direction and cemented them at the vanguard of rock innovators. In 2011, "Uncut" magazine staff voted "Smile" the "greatest bootleg recording of all time".
1967–1969: Faltered popularity and Brian's reduced involvement.
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"Smiley Smile" and "Wild Honey".
From 1965 to 1967, the Beach Boys had developed a musical and lyrical sophistication that contrasted their work from before and after. This divide was further solidified by the difference in sound between their albums and their stage performances. This resulted in a split fanbase corresponding to two distinct musical markets. One group enjoys the band's early work as a wholesome representation of American popular culture from before the political and social movements brought on in the mid-1960s. The other group also appreciates the early songs for their energy and complexity, but not as much as the band's ambitious work that was created during the formative psychedelic era. At the time, rock music journalists typically valued the Beach Boys' early records over their experimental work.
In May 1967, the Beach Boys attempted to tour Europe with four extra musicians brought from the US, but were stopped by the British musicians' union. The tour went on without the extra support, and critics described their performances as "amateurish" and "floundering". At the last minute, the Beach Boys declined to headline the Monterey Pop Festival, an event held in June. According to David Leaf, "Monterey was a gathering place for the 'far out' sounds of the 'new' rock ... and it is thought that [their] non-appearance was what really turned the 'underground' tide against them." Fan magazines speculated that the group was on the verge of breaking up. Detractors called the band the "Bleach Boys" and "the California Hypes" as media focus shifted from Los Angeles to the happenings in San Francisco. As authenticity became a higher concern among critics, the group's legitimacy in rock music became an oft-repeated criticism, especially since their early songs appeared to celebrate a politically unconscious youth culture.
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Although "Smile" had been cancelled, the Beach Boys were still under pressure and a contractual obligation to record and present an album to Capitol. Carl remembered: "Brian just said, 'I can't do this. We're going to make a homespun version of ["Smile"] instead. We're just going to take it easy. I'll get in the pool and sing. Or let's go in the gym and do our parts.' That was "Smiley Smile"." Sessions for the new album lasted from June to July 1967 at Brian's new makeshift home studio. Most of the album featured the Beach Boys playing their own instruments, rather than the session musicians employed in much of their previous work. It was the first album for which production was credited to the entire group instead of Brian alone.
In July 1967, lead single "Heroes and Villains" was issued, arriving after months of public anticipation, and reached number 12 in US. It was met with general confusion and underwhelming reviews, and in the "NME", Jimi Hendrix famously dismissed it as a "psychedelic barbershop quartet". By then, the group's lawsuit with Capitol was resolved, and it was agreed that "Smile" would not be the band's next album. In August, the group embarked on a two-date tour of Hawaii. The shows saw Brian make a brief return to live performance, as Bruce Johnston chose to take a temporary break from the band during the summer of 1967, feeling that the atmosphere within the band "had all got too weird". The performances were filmed and recorded with the intention of releasing a live album, "Lei'd in Hawaii", which was also left unfinished and unreleased. The general record-buying public came to view the music made after this time as the point marking the band's artistic decline.
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"Smiley Smile" was released on September 18, 1967, and peaked at number 41 in the US, making it their worst-selling album to that date. Critics and fans were generally underwhelmed by the album. According to Scott Schinder, the album was released to "general incomprehension. While "Smile" may have divided the Beach Boys' fans had it been released, "Smiley Smile" merely baffled them." The group was virtually blacklisted by the music press, to the extent that reviews of the group's records were either withheld from publication or published long after the release dates. When released in the UK in November, it performed better, reaching number 9. Over the years, the album gathered a reputation as one of the best "chill-out" albums to listen to during an LSD comedown. In 1974, "NME" voted it the 64th-greatest album of all time.
The Beach Boys immediately recorded a new album, "Wild Honey", an excursion into soul music, and a self-conscious attempt to "regroup" themselves as a rock band in opposition to their more orchestral affairs of the past. Its music differs in many ways from previous Beach Boys records: it contains very little group singing compared to previous albums, and mainly features Brian singing at his piano. Again, the Beach Boys recorded mostly at his home studio. Love reflected that "Wild Honey" was "completely out of the mainstream for what was going on at that time ... and that was the idea".
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"Wild Honey" was released on December 18, 1967, in competition with the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" and the Rolling Stones' "Their Satanic Majesties Request". It had a higher chart placing than "Smiley Smile", but still failed to make the top-twenty and remained on the charts for only 15 weeks. As with "Smiley Smile", contemporary critics viewed it as inconsequential, and it alienated fans whose expectations had been raised by "Smile". That month, Mike Love told a British journalist: "Brian has been rethinking our recording program and in any case we all have a much greater say nowadays in what we turn out in the studio."
"Friends", "20/20", and Manson affair.
The Beach Boys were at their lowest popularity in the late 1960s, and their cultural standing was especially worsened by their public image, which remained incongruous with their peers' "heavier" music. At the end of 1967, "Rolling Stone" co-founder and editor Jann Wenner printed an influential article that denounced the Beach Boys as "just one prominent example of a group that has gotten hung up on trying to catch The Beatles. It's a pointless pursuit." The article had the effect of excluding the group among serious rock fans and such controversy followed them into the next year. Capitol continued to bill them as "America's Top Surfin' Group!" and expected Brian to write more beachgoing songs for the yearly summer markets. From 1968 onward, his songwriting output declined substantially, but the public narrative of "Brian as leader" continued. The group also stopped wearing their longtime striped-shirt stage uniforms in favor of matching white, polyester suits that resembled a Las Vegas show band's.
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After meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at a UNICEF Variety Gala in Paris, Love and other high-profile celebrities such as the Beatles and Donovan traveled to Rishikesh, India, in February–March 1968. The following Beach Boys album, "Friends", had songs influenced by the Transcendental Meditation the Maharishi taught. In support of "Friends", Love arranged for the Beach Boys to tour with the Maharishi in the US. Starting on May 3, 1968, the tour lasted five shows and was canceled when the Maharishi withdrew to fulfill film contracts. Because of disappointing audience numbers and the Maharishi's withdrawal, 24 tour dates were canceled at a cost estimated at $250,000. "Friends", released on June 24, peaked at number 126 in the US. In August, Capitol issued an album of Beach Boys backing tracks, "Stack-o-Tracks". It was the first Beach Boys LP that failed to chart in the US and UK.
In June 1968, Dennis befriended Charles Manson, an aspiring singer-songwriter, and their relationship lasted for several months. Dennis bought him time at Brian's home studio, where recording sessions were attempted while Brian stayed in his room. Dennis then proposed that Manson be signed to Brother Records. Brian reportedly disliked Manson, and a deal was never made. In July 1968, the group released the single "Do It Again", which lyrically harkened back to their earlier surf songs. Around this time, Brian admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital; his bandmates wrote and produced material in his absence. Released in January 1969, the album "20/20" mixed new material with outtakes and leftovers from recent albums; Brian produced virtually none of the newer recordings.
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The Beach Boys recorded one song by Manson without his involvement: "Cease to Exist", rewritten as "Never Learn Not to Love", which was included on "20/20". As his cult of followers took over Dennis's home, Dennis gradually distanced himself from Manson. According to Leaf, "The entire Wilson family reportedly feared for their lives."
In August, the Manson Family committed the Tate–LaBianca murders. According to Jon Parks, the band's tour manager, it was widely suspected in the Hollywood community that Manson was responsible for the murders, and it had been known that Manson had been involved with the Beach Boys, causing the band to be viewed as pariahs for a time. In November, police apprehended Manson, and his connection with the Beach Boys received media attention. He was later convicted for several counts of murder and conspiracy to murder.
Selling of the band's publishing.
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In August, Sea of Tunes, the Beach Boys' catalog, was sold to Irving Almo Music for $700,000 (equivalent to $ in ). According to his wife, Marilyn Wilson, Brian was devastated by the sale. Over the years, the catalog generated more than $100 million in publishing royalties, none of which Murry or the band members ever received. That same month, Carl, Dennis, Love, and Jardine sought a permanent replacement for Johnston, with Johnston unaware of this search. They approached Carl's brother-in-law Billy Hinsche, who declined the offer to focus on his college studies.
1970–1978: Reprise era.
"Sunflower", "Surf's Up", "Carl and the Passions", and "Holland".
The group was signed to Reprise Records in 1970. Scott Schinder described the label as "probably the hippest and most artist-friendly major label of the time". The deal was brokered by Van Dyke Parks, who was then employed as a multimedia executive at Warner Music Group. Reprise's contract stipulated Brian's proactive involvement with the band in all albums. By the time the Beach Boys' tenure ended with Capitol in 1969, they had sold 65 million records worldwide, closing the decade as the most commercially successful American group in popular music.
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