Feature Channels: Nuclear Physics

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Sandia National Laboratories explores the evolution of nuclear deterrence in a new documentary that combines modern and historical footage with a wide range of interviews. On Deterrence features interviews with former secretaries of defense, general officers, policymakers, analysts, scholars and scientists with varied viewpoints to describe the impact of nuclear deterrence since the end of World War II.

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Scientists experimentally validated the predicted damage mechanism for materials in nuclear energy environments.

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Hugh Montgomery, director of the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), was awarded The Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award by the Secretary of Energy earlier this year.

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In December, five students from Stony Brook University in New York and their research professor loaded a prototype of a magnetic cloak into an SUV and set off for Argonne National Laboratory, nearly 900 miles away.

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LLNL researchers have demonstrated for the first time that it is possible for a planetary collision to form a moon large enough for Kepler to detect. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist Megan Bruk Syal and Amy Barr of the Planetary Science Institute conducted a series of around 30 simulations to explore how various factors affect moon creation.

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Theorists and scientists conducting experiments that recreate matter as it existed in the very early universe are gathered in Chicago this week to present and discuss their latest results.

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Sandia National Laboratories computer scientists have recently adapted augmented reality to enhance training of nuclear power security personnel around the world.

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KATRIN project achieves transmission of electrons through completed apparatus, opening new doors to understanding the universe.

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Michael Tonks, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and nuclear engineering at Penn State, was selected by former U.S. President Barack Obama to receive a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

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UT-Battelle, managing contractor of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is marking the discovery of element 117 by providing more than 1,000 public middle schools and high schools in Tennessee with new charts of the periodic table. Tennessine—the element’s official name—completes the table’s seventh row and the column of elements classified as halogens.

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Click here to go directly to the Physics News Source Sponsored by AIP.

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From advances in accelerators and experiments exploring the building blocks of matter and making medical isotopes to new revelations about superconductors, nanomaterials, and biofuels, 2016 was a year of accomplishment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Here are our Top-10 highlights.

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A new technique could allow the exploitation of polarized positron beams for a range of uses, including improved product manufacturing.

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Scientists need ultra-pure helium for a wide range of experiments. Researchers demonstrated an approach that reaches a level of precision several orders of magnitude beyond that of any other technique.

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Berkelium was one of a few elements that had yet to be characterized in detail. Researchers structurally characterized it and revealed unexpected findings.

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Jefferson Science Associates, LLC today announced that Stuart Henderson will become the new Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. Currently serving as the Director of the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade Project at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, Henderson will assume his responsibilities at Jefferson Lab on April 3.

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Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Data Group is conducting new experiments to address common data needs in nuclear medicine, nuclear energy and fusion R&D, security, and counterproliferation work.

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Raju Venugopalan, a senior physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award for his remarkable achievements in theoretical nuclear physics.

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Elena Long, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of New Hampshire, has been awarded the 2016 Jefferson Science Associates Postdoctoral Research Prize for plans to build and test a new kind of target that will allow scientists to explore the physics of spinning nuclei at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

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For the third time in its history, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is home to one of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers. The SciPhi-XVI supercomputer was just listed as a TOP500 Supercomputer Site on November 14, placing 397th on the 48th edition of the list of the world’s top supercomputers.

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Physicists from around the world gathered at the University of California, Irvine this past summer for a symposium in honor of Wei-li Lee, a senior physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

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Two researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been elected fellows of the American Nuclear Society. Alan S. Icenhour and Jess C. Gehin were recognized for their outstanding scientific and technical leadership in nuclear energy research and development.

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Article describes appointment of PPPL Physicist Richard Hawryluk as chair of the Nuclear Fusion editorial board.

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For a second straight summer, Rachel Seibert spent her days at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researching advanced nuclear reactors. The Ph.D. candidate may not have had such an opportunity more than a decade ago, but thanks to a unique internship program, Seibert analyzed tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) fuels and continued to pave the path toward her post-graduation career.

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Tools that track underground contaminants and speed carbon capture technology development are among R&D Magazine’s 100 most innovative scientific breakthroughs of the year.

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Iowa State University researchers have helped demonstrate the existence of a tetraneutron, a subatomic structure once thought unlikely to exist.

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How do you handle nuclear waste that will be radioactive for millions of years, keeping it from harming people and the environment? It isn’t easy, but Rutgers researcher Ashutosh Goel has discovered ways to immobilize such waste – the offshoot of decades of nuclear weapons production – in glass and ceramics.

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KITP’s Greg Huber worked with nuclear physicists to confirm a structural similarity found in both human cells and neutron stars.

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Piece describes R. Goldstone's 2015 Nuclear Fusion Award.

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Theoretical physicists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently used Titan, America’s most powerful supercomputer, to compute the nuclear structure of nickel-78 and found that this neutron-rich nucleus is indeed doubly magic.

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Sandia National Laboratories sent a mock B61-12 nuclear weapon speeding down the labs’ 10,000-foot rocket sled track to slam nose-first into a steel and concrete wall in a spectacular test that mimicked a high-speed accident. It allowed engineers to examine safety features inside the weapon that prevent inadvertent nuclear detonation.

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Joseph Labrum, a Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship student at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, spent his summer internship building components to upgrade an experiment that successfully compared physical objects without learning anything about the objects themselves. Such a “zero-knowledge protocol” system is a promising first step toward a technique that could possibly be used in future disarmament agreements, pending the results of further development, testing, and evaluation. While important questions remain, it might have potential application to verify that nuclear warheads are in fact true warheads without revealing classified information.

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Work on computing the behaviors of the smallest bits of matter in the universe at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has just gotten a nod from Intel®, as the laboratory becomes the newest Intel® Parallel Computing Center. Jefferson Lab has also just installed its newest parallel computing cluster, featuring Intel® architecture, which is set to go into production in October.

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On September 18, 2016, Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility performed its 400th experiment of fiscal year (FY) 2016. In comparison, the facility completed 356 experiments in FY15 and 191 experiments in FY14. NIF is on track to complete 415 experiments by the end of the fiscal year, more than doubling its FY14 accomplishments.

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Article describes successful demonstration of cryptographic technique that may have applicability to future nuclear disarmament agreements.

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Extremely complex plutonium has ties to energy and security. Scientists from Pacific Northwest National Lab and Washington State University found that plutonium's behavior, in plutonium tetrafluoride, can be attributed to atoms hoarding electrons

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A consortium of institutions led by TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science, is granting sole rights for its proprietary technetium-99m (Tc-99m) production technology to ARTMS™ Products, Inc (ARTMS). Technetium-99m is used in over 80% of all nuclear medicine imaging procedures and is vital to patient care in areas such as cardiology, oncology, and neurology.

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A research group from the University of Saskatchewan has found that the mining and milling of Canadian uranium contributes very few greenhouse gases to nuclear power’s already low emissions. The study, conducted by David Parker, a graduate student in the College of Engineering co-supervised by U of S professor emeritus Gordon Sparks and environmental engineer Cameron McNaughton, was published online in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology.

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Scientists performed an exquisitely precise measurement of the angular distribution of neutrinos emerging from beta decay using a novel approach to reveal the subtle imprint of tensor interactions -- processes that have long defied measurement.

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Having built their nest over the vertical ventilation pipe of an old nuclear weapon bunker in Poland, every year a large number of wood ants fall down the pipe to never return back to their colony.

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Article describes spherical tokamaks as models for the next steps in fusion energy.

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This year the field of neutrino physics is full of enthusiasm as three significant experiments with different goals gear up to advance our understanding of neutrino physics. All three experiments benefit from expertise and facilities at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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Sandia National Laboratories, which has been in the business of nuclear detonation detection for more than 50 years, is working on the next generation system.

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Or Hen has been awarded the 2015 Jefferson Science Associates Thesis Prize for the thesis he wrote about his research on how protons and neutrons interact inside the nucleus of the atom at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

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A group of Texas Tech researchers report this week in Applied Physics Letters that they have developed an alternative material to the rare, expensive gas normally used for neutron detection. This material fulfills many key requirements for helium gas detector replacements and can serve as a low-cost alternative in the future.

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A group of Texas Tech University researchers led by Professors Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin report this week in Applied Physics Letters that they have developed an alternative material -- hexagonal boron nitride semiconductors -- for neutron detection. This material fulfills many key requirements for helium gas detector replacements and can serve as a low-cost alternative in the future.

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Using information on the propagation and attenuation of fast particles coming from the collisions of high-energy nuclei, nuclear physicists can extract transport properties of the hot, dense matter.

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Physicists and engineers demonstrated that it is possible to use liquid helium to apply an electric field several times larger than that used in previous neutron electric dipole moment experiments, which provides insights into the nature of the universe.

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A new study just published in Physical Review Letters reveals that a high degree of gluon fluctuation--a kind of flickering rearrangement in the distribution of gluon density within individual protons--could help explain some of the remarkable results at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory -- and also in nuclear physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe.

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Magnetism permeates every scale of TRIUMF life, from the cyclotron’s 17m diameter main magnet down five orders of magnitude to the tiny internal magnetic fields inside millimetre-sized samples probed by μSR (muon spin rotation/resonance/relaxation) experiments, all the way down to probing materials at the tens of nanometre scale with the βNMR (beta-delayed nuclear magnetic resonance) facility.