Feature Channels: Particle Physics

• share
• favorite_border

Zhaodi Pan developed a detector to search for ancient clues in the cosmic microwave background.

• share
• favorite_border

Jefferson Sciences Associates (JSA) has announced the award of $558,060 through its JSA Initiatives Fund Program. The program supports projects by staff and scientific users at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The FY23 program awards leveraged over $800,000 in matching funds, and taken together, the program and matching awards total over $1.3 million. Project awards include scientific meeting support, education and career development, and outreach activities, all of which support the lab’s mission.

• share
• favorite_border

An international team of scientists led by a University of Houston physicist and several of his former students has reported a new approach to constructing the thermoelectric modules, using silver nanoparticles to connect the modules’ electrode and metallization layers.

• share
• favorite_border

Whenever SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s linear accelerator is on, packs of around a billion electrons each travel together at nearly the speed of light through metal piping. These electron bunches form the accelerator’s particle beam, which is used to study the atomic behavior of molecules, novel materials and many other subjects.

• share
• favorite_border

The tensor charge in protons is the net transverse spin of the proton or the quarks that make it up. The only way to obtain the tensor charge from experimental data is using the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to extract the "transversity" function, which encodes the difference between the number of quarks with their spin aligned and anti-aligned to the proton’s spin when it is in a transverse direction. Using state-of-the-art data science techniques, researchers recently made the most precise ever empirical determination of the tensor charge.

• share
• favorite_border

Ammonia (NH3) is one of the most widely produced chemicals in the world, with a production of over 187 million tons in 2020. About 85% of it is used to produce nitrogenous fertilizers, while the rest is used for refining petroleum, manufacturing a wide range of other chemicals, and creating synthetic fibers such as nylon.

• share
• favorite_border

A team of researchers has demonstrated the ultimate sensitivity allowed by quantum physics in measuring the time delay between two photons. It has the potential to significantly improve the imaging of nanostructures, including biological samples, and nanomaterial surfaces.

• share
• favorite_border

Physicist Emily Mace will share her science journey and an interactive presentation about her current research with middle school and high school students from across the country at the National Science Bowl.

• share
• favorite_border

Researcher will discuss the study which involved a sleeping aid known as suvorexant that is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for insomnia, hints at the potential of sleep medications to slow or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

• share
• favorite_border

In a unique analysis of experimental data, nuclear physicists have made the first-ever observations of how lambda particles, so-called “strange matter,” are produced by a specific process called semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS). What’s more, these data hint that the building blocks of protons, quarks and gluons, are capable of marching through the atomic nucleus in pairs called diquarks, at least part of the time.

• share
• favorite_border

A multi-institutional team of nuclear science researchers has published the results of the first experiment at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams. The experiment involved colliding a beam of stable calcium-48 nuclei traveling at about 60 percent of the speed of light into a beryllium target to produce isotopes near the “drip line,” the spot where neutrons can no longer bind to a nucleus but instead drip off.

• share
• favorite_border

For the last six years, Indiana University researchers and collaborators from around the world have helped push the horizons on research concerning one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe: neutrinos.

• share
• favorite_border

In Applied Physics Letters, researchers in the U.K. introduce a novel imaging method to detect gold nanoparticles in woodlice. Their method, known as four-wave mixing microscopy, flashes light that the gold nanoparticles absorb. The light flashes again and the subsequent scattering reveals the nanoparticles’ locations. With information about the quantity, location, and impact of gold nanoparticles within the organism, scientists can better understand the potential harm other metals may have on nature.

• share
• favorite_border

Aerosols particles in the atmosphere are an important factor in the Earth’s climate, but researchers lack information on these aerosols’ molecular composition, especially for aerosols during the day and night above agricultural fields. In this research, scientists examined secondary organic aerosols over agricultural fields in the Southern Great Plains in Oklahoma. They found that the aerosols’ composition and structure differ from day to night and that some aerosols are ultimately from urban sources.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers are designing nanoparticles to treat inflammatory bowel diseases such as such as Chron’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Key innovations are the design of self-assembling nanoparticles that carry drugs and naturally target inflamed colons. The nanoparticles could deliver relief to more than 3 million Americans who suffer from the diseases.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists analyzed data from collisions of heavy ions to determine the factors that most influence fluctuations in the flow of particles. The researchers found that conditions established just as the ions collide have the greatest impact on particle flow fluctuations. This will help physicists make more precise calculations of the properties of the quark-gluon plasma formed in these collisions and understand how the collision transforms nuclei from protons and neutrons into quark-gluon plasma.

• share
• favorite_border

Navid Vafaei-Najafabadi is a scientist who wears many hats. At Stony Brook University, he is an assistant professor in Department of Physics and Astronomy and leads the Plasma Accelerator Group. At the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Vafaei-Najafabadi is the facility scientist at the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF), where he helps set the scientific direction of the work performed there.

• share
• favorite_border

In certain molecules, the so-called photoacids, a proton can be released locally by excitation with light. There is a sudden change in the pH value in the solution – a kind of fast switch that is important for many chemical and biological processes.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists working on the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment are developing a vertical drift detector. The new technology may open doors to building large neutrino detectors at a lower cost and in a simpler manner.

• share
• favorite_border

The international DUNE collaboration is conducting final tests of the components for its first neutrino detector module, to be installed a mile underground in South Dakota. Preparations for ramping up the mass production of these components are underway.

• share
• favorite_border

Particles in the atmosphere such as black carbon affect global climate by absorbing and radiating light and heat. To calculate the effects of aerosols on climate, scientists rely on simulated aerosol fields, but these models represent mixtures of aerosol particles in simplified ways that can introduce errors. This study quantified the resulting errors in simulated aerosol optical properties, finding errors great enough to warrant more attention.

• share
• favorite_border

By colliding protons with heavier ions and tracking particles from these collisions, scientists can study the quarks and gluons that make up protons and neutrons. Recent results revealed a suppression of certain back-to-back pairs of particles that emerge from interactions of single quarks from the proton with single gluons in the heavier ion. The results suggest that gluons in heavy nuclei recombine, a step toward proving that gluons reach a postulated steady state called saturation, where gluon splitting and recombination balance.

• share
• favorite_border

Nuclear physicists have found a new way to see inside nuclei by tracking interactions between particles of light and gluons. The method relies on harnessing a new type of quantum interference between two dissimilar particles. Tracking how these entangled particles emerge from the interactions lets scientists map out the arrangement of gluons. This approach is unusual for making use of entanglement between dissimilar particles—something rare in quantum studies.

• share
• favorite_border

The interactions of the quarks and gluons that make up protons and neutrons are so strong that the structure of protons and neutrons is difficult to calculate from theory and must be instead measured experimentally. Neutrino experiments use targets that are nuclei made of many protons and neutrons bound together. This complicates interpreting those measurements to infer proton structure. By scattering neutrinos from the protons that are the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in the MINERvA detector, scientists have provided the first measurements of this structure with neutrinos using unbound protons.

• share
• favorite_border

In a scientific first, a team led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine has detected neutrinos created by a particle collider. The discovery promises to deepen scientists’ understanding of the subatomic particles, which were first spotted in 1956 and play a key role in the process that makes stars burn.

• share
• favorite_border

Mary Bishai, a distinguished scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been elected co-spokesperson of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). In her new role, Bishai will lead DUNE’s 1,400-member international collaboration—the largest neutrino collaboration in the world.

• share
• favorite_border

A novel cancer therapeutic, combining antibody fragments with molecularly engineered nanoparticles, permanently eradicated gastric cancer in treated mice, a multi-institutional team of researchers found.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers show how energy disappears in quantum turbulence. The discovery paves way for a better understanding of turbulence in scales ranging from the microscopic to the planetary

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to study some of the hottest matter ever created in a laboratory have published their first data showing how three distinct variations of particles called upsilons sequentially “melt,” or dissociate, in the hot goo.

• share
• favorite_border

We need a better understanding of the particles emitted by wildfires, including how they evolve, so we can improve our predictions of their impacts on climate, climate change, and human health. Atmospheric scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborating institutions recently published a study that suggests the global climate models aren’t getting the full picture. Their data could change that.

• share
• favorite_border

Tiny particles in Earth’s atmosphere can have a big impact on climate. But understanding exactly how these aerosol particles form cloud drops and affect the absorption and scattering of sunlight is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in climate models. Ogochukwu (Ogo) Enekwizu is trying to tame that complexity by creating soot-seeded aerosol particles in a lab.

• share
• favorite_border

When physicists steered a tiny microparticle toward a cylindrical obstacle, they expected one of two outcomes to occur. The particle would either collide into the obstacle or sail around it. The particle, however, did neither.

• share
• favorite_border

A new analysis supports the idea that photons colliding with heavy ions create a fluid of “strongly interacting” particles. The results indicate that photon-heavy ion collisions can create a strongly interacting fluid that responds to the initial collision geometry and that these collisions can form a quark-gluon plasma. These findings will help guide future experiments at the planned Electron-Ion Collider.

• share
• favorite_border

A statewide University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)-led effort to fund, develop and commercialize plasma research and the high-tech workforce it requires is reaching out to a broad coalition of researchers, students, businesspeople and the public with a goal of stimulating thousands of high-paying jobs in Alabama and the Southeast.

• share
• favorite_border

The research team of Dr. Yong-sang Ryu at the Brain Research Institute of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) used an electro-photonic tweezer along with metal nanoparticles to concentrate ultrafine nanoplastics within a short period, and they reported the development of a real-time detection system using light.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists used statistical tools, machine learning, and models run on supercomputers to explore nuclear force models. This allows scientists to make quantitative predictions about the structure of atomic nuclei and their interactions. Scientists used this approach to study the nucleus of lead-208 and predict its neutron skin. The results indicate the neutron skin is constrained by nucleon-nucleon scattering data.

• share
• favorite_border

Using lasers to slow down atoms is a technique that has been used for a long time already: If one wants to achieve low-temperature world records in the range of absolute temperature zero, one resorts to laser cooling, in which energy is extracted from the atoms with a suitable laser beam.

• share
• favorite_border

Below are some of the latest articles that have been added to the Chemistry news channel on Newswise.

• share
• favorite_border

Lance Dixon, professor of particle physics and astrophysics at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, will receive the 2023 Galileo Galilei Medal for his contributions to theoretical physics. The award was announced by the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) on Feb. 15 – the 459th birthday of Galileo.

• share
• favorite_border

Since the 1970s, scientists have known that copper has a special ability to transform carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels. But for many years, scientists have struggled to understand how this common metal works as an electrocatalyst, a mechanism that uses energy from electrons to chemically transform molecules into different products.

• share
• favorite_border

Long before Dr. Jukka Vayrynen was an assistant professor at the Purdue Department of Physics and Astronomy, he was a post-doc investigating a theoretical model with emergent particles in a condensed matter setting.

• share
• favorite_border

Since it first went online more than 30 years ago, the Vertical Test Area at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has gotten used to superlatives. One of the biggest testbeds of its kind. The busiest. The most versatile.Now, the Vertical Test Area that was created to help build Jefferson Lab’s main particle accelerator has hit another milestone: In 2022, it conducted a mind-boggling 470 different superconducting radiofrequency accelerator cavity tests. In the rarified world of accelerators, that’s an Olympic-level achievement.

• share
• favorite_border

Story tips: Neutrons uncover hydrogen’s hidden role in twisting iron; Entangled quantum particles are viable in space; Reused car batteries rev up electric grid; Pulling the shades for energy savings

• share
• favorite_border

The protons and neutrons that build the nucleus of the atom frequently pair up in fleeting partnerships called short-range correlations. These can form between a proton and a neutron, between two protons, or between two neutrons. Scientists recently discovered that in helium-3 and tritium, which have small, light nuclei, some types of correlations are less common than they are in larger, heavier nuclei.

• share
• favorite_border

The ways in which particles, such as sand or liquid droplets, behave during various mechanical processes is well studied.

• share
• favorite_border

Excitons are drawing attention as possible quantum bits (qubits) in tomorrow’s quantum computers and are central to optoelectronics and energy-harvesting processes. However, these charge-neutral quasiparticles, which exist in semiconductors and other materials, are notoriously difficult to confine and manipulate. Now, for the first time, Berkeley Lab researchers have created and directly observed highly localized excitons confined in simple stacks of atomically thin materials. The work confirms theoretical predictions and opens new avenues for controlling excitons with custom-built materials.