Feature Channels: Particle Physics

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Released: 3-Oct-2016 2:05 PM EDT
Physicist Steven Sabbagh Leads Study to Predict and Avoid Disruptions on KSTAR Plasmas
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Article describes multinational contract to study prediction and avoidance of disruptions on South Korea's KSTAR tokamak

Released: 29-Sep-2016 2:00 PM EDT
Spiral Arms Embrace Young Star
National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Swirling around the young star Elias 2-27 is a stunning spiral-shape pinwheel of dust.

Released: 29-Sep-2016 7:05 AM EDT
You Keep Using That Physics Word
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)

Physics can often seem inconceivable. It’s a field of strange concepts and special terms. And to make things even more complicated, physics has repurposed a number of familiar English words. Not to worry! Here is a handy list of words that acquire a new meaning when spoken by physicists.

Released: 28-Sep-2016 1:05 PM EDT
Cosmology Safe as Universe Has No Sense of Direction
University College London

The universe is expanding uniformly according to research led by UCL which reports that space isn’t stretching in a preferred direction or spinning.

23-Sep-2016 9:05 AM EDT
Cosmic Dust Demystified
American Institute of Physics (AIP)

Besides providing substantive information about the atmospheres of other planets, cosmic dust particles can impact radio communications, climate and even serve as fertilizer for phytoplankton in the oceans. A team of researchers has developed a new experimental Meteoric Ablation Simulator (MASI) that can help answer questions about cosmic dust and how it impacts Earth and everything on it.

Released: 26-Sep-2016 12:00 PM EDT
Construction of World’s Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector Moves Forward
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

LUX-ZEPLIN, an ultrasensitive dark matter detector, has cleared a major approval milestone and is on track to begin its mile-deep hunt for theoretical particles known as WIMPs in 2020.

Released: 26-Sep-2016 11:05 AM EDT
Photons Do the Twist, and Scientists Can Now Measure It
University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering

Researchers in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering have measured the twisting force, or torque, generated by light on a silicon chip. Their work holds promise for applications such as miniaturized gyroscopes and torsional sensors to measure magnetic field, which can have significant industrial and consumer impact.

21-Sep-2016 2:00 PM EDT
ALMA Explores the Hubble Ultra Deep Field
National Radio Astronomy Observatory

An international team of astronomers using ALMA has explored the same distant corner of the universe first revealed in the iconic image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Released: 22-Sep-2016 10:00 AM EDT
Hubble Finds Planet Orbiting Pair of Stars
Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and a trick of nature, have confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our galaxy. The Hubble observations represent the first time such a three-body system has been confirmed using the gravitational microlensing technique.

Released: 21-Sep-2016 3:05 PM EDT
Argonne Ahead of the “Curve” in Magnetic Study
Argonne National Laboratory

In a new study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, scientists noticed that magnetic skyrmions – small electrically uncharged circular structures with a spiraling magnetic pattern – do get deflected by an applied current, much like a curveball gets deflected by airflow.

Released: 21-Sep-2016 11:05 AM EDT
'Schroedinger's Cat' Molecules Give Rise to Exquisitely Detailed Movies
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Scientists have known for a long time that an atom or molecule can also be in two different states at once. Now researchers at the Stanford PULSE Institute and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have exploited this Schroedinger’s Cat behavior to create X-ray movies of atomic motion with much more detail than ever before.

Released: 21-Sep-2016 6:00 AM EDT
Galactic Fireworks Illuminate Monster Hydrogen Blob
National Radio Astronomy Observatory

An international team of researchers using ALMA and other telescopes has discovered the power source illuminating a so-called Lyman-alpha Blob – a rare, brightly glowing, and enormous concentration of gas in the distant universe.

Released: 15-Sep-2016 11:00 AM EDT
Black Hole Hidden Within Its Own Exhaust
National Radio Astronomy Observatory

New data from ALMA reveal that the black hole at the center of a galaxy named NGC 1068 is actually the source of its own dusty torus of dust and gas, forged from material flung out of the black hole’s accretion disk.

Released: 14-Sep-2016 9:00 AM EDT
HERA, the ‘Cosmic Dawn’ Telescope, Receives Major NSF Support
National Radio Astronomy Observatory

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has approved nearly $10 million in funding to expand the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) – a multinational experiment to study how primordial galaxies forever changed the very early universe. This investment will increase the number of HERA antennas from 19 to 240 by the year 2018.

8-Sep-2016 9:05 AM EDT
Foam Stops Sloshing Liquid
American Institute of Physics (AIP)

Clinking your glass of beer often leaves its contents sloshing back and forth. Soon, though, the motion stops, your drink settles, and you can sip without getting foam on your nose. The foam helps stop the sloshing, and now, physicists have figured out why. The analysis, published in Physics of Fluids, reveals a surprising effect on the surface of the water that contradicts conventional thought and deepens our understanding of the role of capillary forces.

Released: 9-Sep-2016 9:55 AM EDT
Scientists Expect to Calculate Amount of Fuel Inside Earth by 2025
University of Maryland, College Park

With three new detectors coming online in the next several years, scientists are confident they will collect enough geoneutrino data to measure Earth's fuel level

Released: 7-Sep-2016 11:05 AM EDT
Ithaca College Professor Part of NASA Mission to Explore Potentially Earth-Bound Asteroid
Ithaca College

When a NASA mission to the asteroid Bennu launches this month, Ithaca College Professor Beth Ellen Clark will be in charge of experiments that could reveal whether the roughly 500-meter-wide celestial body will collide with Earth in the next century.

Released: 6-Sep-2016 11:45 AM EDT
Detailed Age Map Shows How Milky Way Came Together
University of Notre Dame

Using colors to identify the approximate ages of more than 130,000 stars in the Milky Way’s halo, University of Notre Dame astronomers have produced the clearest picture yet of how the galaxy formed more than 13.5 billion years ago.

Released: 2-Sep-2016 1:05 PM EDT
SLAC Summer Institute Students Envision a New Energy Frontier
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Over a hundred physicists from around the world came to the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for two weeks in August to attend the 44th SLAC Summer Institute (SSI) on “New Horizons on the Energy Frontier.”

Released: 29-Aug-2016 2:05 PM EDT
New Discovery Proxima B Is in Host Star's Habitable Zone — but Could It Really Be Habitable?
University of Washington

The world's attention is now on Proxima Centauri b, a possibly Earth-like planet orbiting the closest star, 4.22 light-years away. The planet's orbit is just right to allow liquid water on its surface, needed for life. But could it in fact be habitable? If so, the planet evolved very different than Earth, say researchers at the University of Washington-based Virtual Planetary Laboratory where astronomers, geophysicists, climatologists, evolutionary biologists and others team to study how distant planets might host life.

Released: 24-Aug-2016 2:05 PM EDT
Can One Cosmic Enigma Help Solve Another?
 Johns Hopkins University

Astrophysicists have proposed a clever new way of shedding light on the mystery of dark matter, believed to make up most of the universe. The irony is they want to try to pin down the nature of this unexplained phenomenon by using another, a cosmic emanation known as “fast radio bursts.”

Released: 23-Aug-2016 5:30 PM EDT
Jens Dilling Named Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences at TRIUMF
TRIUMF

TRIUMF is pleased to announce that Dr. Jens Dilling will become Associate Laboratory Director for its Physical Sciences Division (ALD-Physical Sciences), effective September 1, 2016.

Released: 23-Aug-2016 10:05 AM EDT
Funneling Fundamental Particles
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)

Fermilab and J-PARC in Japan are the only major laboratories now hosting experiments with neutrino horns and Fermilab is one of the few places in the world that makes them.

Released: 21-Aug-2016 2:05 AM EDT
UCLA Physicists Discover 'Apparent Departure From the Laws of Thermodynamics'
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)

According to the basic laws of thermodynamics, if you leave a warm apple pie in a winter window eventually the pie would cool down to the same temperature as the surrounding air.

Released: 19-Aug-2016 3:05 PM EDT
The Comet That Disappeared: What Happened to Ison?
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

New study suggests the comet broke up before reaching the Sun

Released: 15-Aug-2016 2:05 PM EDT
UCI Physicists Confirm Possible Discovery of Fifth Force of Nature
University of California, Irvine

Recent findings indicating the possible discovery of a previously unknown subatomic particle may be evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by theoretical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.

Released: 15-Aug-2016 11:15 AM EDT
New Material Discovery Allows Study of Elusive Weyl Fermion
Ames National Laboratory

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have discovered a new type of Weyl semimetal, a material that opens the way for further study of Weyl fermions, a type of massless elementary particle hypothesized by high-energy particle theory and potentially useful for creating high-speed electronic circuits and quantum computers.

Released: 12-Aug-2016 3:05 PM EDT
Fermi Researchers Explore New Ways of Searching for Dark Matter
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Researchers working with more than six years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have used novel approaches to search for cosmic signals that could reveal what mysterious dark matter is made of. The scientists looked for hypothetical axion particles, studied the gamma-ray emissions from a large satellite galaxy of our Milky Way and analyzed the faint glow of gamma rays that covers the entire sky.

Released: 11-Aug-2016 12:05 PM EDT
Much Ado About Nothing: Astronomers Use Empty Space to Study the Universe
Ohio State University

In a paper to appear in upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, the international team of astronomers reports that they were able to achieve four times better precision in measurements of how the universe’s visible matter is clustered together by studying the empty spaces in between.

Released: 9-Aug-2016 1:05 PM EDT
DOE Approves Construction of 3-D Galaxy-Mapping Project ‘DESI’
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

A 3-D sky-mapping project that will measure the light of 35 million cosmic objects has received formal approval from the Department of Energy to move forward with construction. Installation of the project, called Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), is set to begin next year at the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, with observations starting up in January 2019.

5-Aug-2016 2:05 PM EDT
Researchers Immobilize Underwater Bubbles
American Institute of Physics (AIP)

Controlling bubbles is a difficult process and one that many of us experienced in a simplistic form as young children wielding a bubble wand, trying to create bigger bubbles without popping them. A research team in CINaM-CNRS Aix-Marseille Université in France has turned child’s play into serious business.

Released: 8-Aug-2016 11:05 PM EDT
Physicist Offers Leading Theory About Mysterious Large Hadron Collider Excess
University of Kansas

In December of last year, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced startling results hinting at the existence of an undiscovered subatomic particle — one with a mass six times heavier than the Higgs boson, the particle that made headlines in 2012.

Released: 8-Aug-2016 2:05 PM EDT
New Results on the Higgs Boson and the Building Blocks of Matter Presented at ICHEP
Brookhaven National Laboratory

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performance surpasses expectations; results confirm the Higgs particle, show "bump" appears to be a statistical fluctuation, and offer insight into quark-gluon plasma at high energies complementary to those explored at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

4-Aug-2016 10:05 AM EDT
IceCube Search for the ‘Sterile Neutrino’ Draws a Blank
University of Wisconsin–Madison

In an effort to fill in the blanks of the Standard Model of particle physics, science has been conducting a diligent search for a hypothesized particle known as the “sterile neutrino.” Now, with the latest results from an icy particle detector at the South Pole, scientists are almost certain that there is no such particle.

5-Aug-2016 12:05 PM EDT
T2K Scientists Say New Findings Provide Insight to Why the Universe Is Dominated by Matter and Why We Exist
Stony Brook University

New findings that reveal why the universe is dominated by matter and why we exist will be presented by the international T2K Collaboration, a team a researchers who will demonstrate why matter and antimatter are different.

Released: 5-Aug-2016 12:05 PM EDT
Scientists Discover Light Could Exist in a Previously Unknown Form
Imperial College London

New research suggests that it is possible to create a new form of light by binding light to a single electron, combining the properties of both.

Released: 3-Aug-2016 11:10 AM EDT
Jet Tomography of Hot Matter
Department of Energy, Office of Science

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.

Released: 2-Aug-2016 4:05 PM EDT
Computation Propels Particle Physicists in Quest for Discovery
University of Chicago

One of the world’s hubs of computation in particle physics sits inconspicuously at the corner of 56th Street and Ellis Avenue on the University of Chicago campus.

Released: 2-Aug-2016 2:05 PM EDT
Higgs Discovery Raises New Questions
University of Chicago

High-energy physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, are hearing a bewitching siren song these days. They call it the 750 GeV bump: It could signal the existence of a new heavy particle—or it could be nothing.

Released: 2-Aug-2016 1:05 PM EDT
Physicist Trio Amplifies SLAC Research on Mysterious Forms of Matter
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

All material things appear to be made of elementary particles that are held together by fundamental forces. But what are their exact properties? Questions with cosmic implications like these drive many of the scientific efforts at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Three distinguished particle physicists have joined the lab over the past months to pursue research on two particularly mysterious forms of matter: neutrinos and dark matter.

Released: 1-Aug-2016 8:05 AM EDT
Beta-NMR Finds New Antiferromagnet Behaviour
TRIUMF

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.

Released: 29-Jul-2016 1:05 PM EDT
The Discovery of New Emission Lines From Highly Charged Heavy Ions
National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS)

Professors Chihiro Suzuki and Izumi Murakami's research group at the National Institute for Fusion Science, together with Professor Fumihiro Koike of Sophia University, injected various elements with high atomic numbers and produced highly charged ions(*1) in LHD plasmas. By measuring the emission spectrum of the extreme ultraviolet wavelength range, they discovered a new spectral line that had not been observed experimentally in the past. This result is not only significant for basic science research, it also is useful fundamental data for plasma application research such as the development of extreme ultraviolet lithography(*2) light sources. This research result was presented in an invited talk at the 43rd European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics, which was held from July 4, 2016, to July 8, 2016.

Released: 27-Jul-2016 11:05 AM EDT
Team Led by Texas Tech Physicists Discovers Loneliest Young Star
Texas Tech University

Alone on the cosmic road, far from any known celestial object, a young, independent star is going through a tremendous growth spurt. when a team led by Texas Tech University Department of Physics associate professor Tom Maccarone and postdoctoral researcher Chris Britt examined infrared images of the same area, they realized this object has a lot of warm dust around it, which must have been heated by an outburst. Researchers determined it likely is a young star that has been outbursting for several years.

Released: 27-Jul-2016 10:05 AM EDT
Did the LIGO Gravitational Waves Originate From Primordial Black Holes?
Kyoto University

Binary black holes recently discovered by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration could be primordial entities that formed just after the Big Bang, report Japanese astrophysicists.

22-Jul-2016 11:05 AM EDT
Plasma Technology Can Be Tapped to Kill Biofilms on Perishable Fruit, Foods
American Institute of Physics (AIP)

Seeing fruit “turn bad and going to waste” inspired a team of researchers in China to explore using atmospheric pressure nonequilibrium plasma -- already widely used for medical purposes -- as a novel solution to extend the shelf life of fruit and other perishable foods. Now they report in Physics of Plasmas about their computational study of how air plasma interacts with bacterial biofilms on an apple’s surface suggests that plasma technology could be used to decontaminate food in the future.

Released: 21-Jul-2016 10:05 PM EDT
New Detector at South Pole Shows Early Success at Neutrino Hunting
Newswise Review

In the second it takes to read these words, 65 billion neutrinos will shoot through every square centimeter of your body. Luckily, these infinitesimal particles don't do any harm -- they pass through us, as they do with most everything, without stopping or interacting.

Released: 21-Jul-2016 12:05 PM EDT
Mars Rover’s Laser Can Now Target Rocks All by Itself
Los Alamos National Laboratory

New software is enabling ChemCam, the laser spectrometer on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, to select rock targets autonomously—the first time autonomous target selection is available for an instrument of this kind on any robotic planetary mission.

Released: 13-Jul-2016 11:05 AM EDT
Gravitational Vortex Provides New Way to Study Matter Close to a Black Hole
University of Southampton

Dr Diego Altamirano from the University of Southampton has contributed to new research that has proved the existence of a ‘gravitational vortex’ around a black hole.



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