Daily News Briefs

Kinetic Ceramics Inc., (KCI) of Hayward, Calif., recently delivered custom piezoelectric actuators and drive electronics to the Precision Engineering Center (PEC) at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C. These actuators support the PEC's research on a new class of precision machining called vibration-assisted machining. . . . New Focus Inc., a developer of photonics and microwave technology, announced it has recently shipped its 4,000th tunable laser. . . . Anthony J. Leggett, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Bertrand I. Halperin, a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard University, will share the 2002-2003 Wolf Prize in physics, among those awarded annually by the Wolf Foundation in recognition of outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, agriculture and the arts. Each prize consists of a $100,000 honorarium. Israeli President Moshe Katsav will present the awards on May 11 in Jerusalem.