Like protons and neutrons, Lambda particles consist of three quarks bound together by gluons. But unlike protons and neutrons, which contain a mixture of up and down quarks, Lambdas also contain a strange quark.
The tantalum isotope, Ta-180m, is found naturally in a long-lived excited state. However, the radioactive decay of this excited state in Ta-180m has never been observed.
Applications are currently being accepted for the Fall 2024 term of two undergraduate internship programs offered by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science: the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program and the Community College Internships (CCI) program.
The room buzzed with conversation, until the moderator attempted to quiet it for a second time. Slowly, discussions paused and heads turned back towards the front of the room.
At high temperatures and densities, plasmas in fusion devices can develop gradients that can grow into instabilities, including edge localized modes (ELMs) that can damage reactor walls. In this research, scientists studied negative triangularity, a way the plasma shape can deviate from an oval. The research found this shaping was inherently free of instabilities across various plasma conditions, including operating reactor conditions.
In cancer research, seeing is believing. Before they can diagnose or treat cancer, researchers and doctors need to have a clear understanding of what’s happening at a microscopic level. While existing technology allows us to see things the naked eye can’t, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is working to standardize a process for staining and seeing cancer in a whole new perspective – in 3D (three dimensions).
Theoretical models can fill the gaps in experimental physics, but using a single imperfect theoretical model can be misleading. To improve the quality of predictions, researchers created a machine learning method that combines the results of several imperfect models.
Conditions in peatlands slow microbial decomposition of organic matter into greenhouse gases. This process stores carbon in the soil. Researchers use the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE) experiment to warm air and soil in a northern Minnesota bog to simulate the effects of climate change on the carbon cycle. The experiments showed that all organic soil components can break down more quickly in warmer conditions.
Experimentalists and theorists have provided strong evidence for the creation of an exotic isotope, nitrogen-9, which has two neutrons and seven protons. This unbalanced ratio of protons to neutrons produces a nucleus that only survives for less than one-billionth of a nanosecond. The work also provides information on nitrogen-9’s mirror nucleus, helium-9, which has two protons to its seven neutrons.
High in the sky over an Alaskan tundra, a small aircraft ran the same pattern over and over again. It swooped through clouds and flew down close to the ground. But there were no people experiencing the flight from inside the plane – it was an unmanned aerial system (UAS). UASs are aircraft that people can operate remotely from the ground. Building on years of testing, researchers working with the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Department of Energy Office of Science user facility are now gaining access to these helpful tools.
Fluids moving through fractures in subsurface rock react with chemicals in the rock to alter the fractures and the rock’s permeability. The processes involved operate much more slowly in the field than in laboratory tests, making them hard to predict. This study used simulations of mineral dissolution to discover a link between the structure of fractures in rock and how that rock reacts with fluid moving through it.
The next generation of programmable quantum devices will require processors built around superior qubits. Researchers developed a blueprint for a novel quantum information processor based on fluxonium qubits. These fluxonium qubits outperform transmons, the most widely used superconducting qubits. The researchers also made practical suggestions on how to adapt and build the cutting-edge hardware for superconducting devices.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the schedule for upcoming events and submissions associated with the competition for the management and operating contract for the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF).
In response to the rapidly evolving landscape of data collection and analysis driven by advances in artificial intelligence, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) have established a Research Coordination Network (RCN) dedicated to advancing privacy research and the development, deployment and scaling of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs). Fulfilling a mandate from the "Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence," the initiative advances the recommendations in the National Strategy to Advance Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Analytics to move towards a data ecosystem where the beneficial power of data can be unlocked while protecting privacy.
Neutrinos from the Sun result from a chain of nuclear fusion reactions. Scientists use theoretical calculations to extrapolate the rate of these reactions using theory and data from experiments on Earth. A new evalution protocol dramatically reduces the uncertainty in these extrapolations. This will help scientists better understand neutrinos and the interior of the Sun.
With time scheduled to use a certain beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source-II (NSLS-II), scientists from NSLS-II and their partner institutions faced a challenge. They planned on researching a special type of region in magnetic materials that could be useful for next-generation computers. Regions in magnetic materials - called magnetic domains - determine a material's magnetic properties. The scientists wanted to study how these magnetic domains changed over time under the influence of an outside magnetic field.
Two collaborations have pioneered a new technique, Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy, to investigate the nature of fundamental particles and forces in the universe. The Project 8 collaboration set an upper limit on the mass of neutrinos. The He6-CRES collaboration observed the decay of radioactive isotopes of helium and neon to set the stage for investigating the weak interaction.
Plasma is unusual here on Earth. It’s a gas that’s so hot that the ions and electrons in it aren’t bound to each other in atoms. Even though it’s one of the four fundamental states of matter, you may never think of it alongside solids, liquids, and gases.
Microalgae in water are responsible for roughly 50% of the photosynthesis that converts carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into organic carbon. Researchers have now quantified the activity in the microbiome associated with these microalgae to investigate how the microbiome’s members process and exchange carbon and nitrogen from algal cells. They used isotopes and high-resolution imaging mass spectrometry to quantify these exchanges at the single-cell level.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced awards totaling $61 million for small businesses in 17 states. The 50 projects funded by DOE’s Office of Science include the development of advanced scientific instruments, advanced materials, and clean energy conversion and storage technologies that will conduct climate research and advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of a net-zero emissions economy.
Researchers studying complex phenomena such as the Higgs boson must work with massive experimental data sets. To help, researchers have defined practical FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles for data and applied the principles to an open simulated tktk from CERN. FAIR will help humans and computers use large data sets, enable modern computers to process these data sets, and aid the development of artificial intelligence tools.
The stone age didn’t end because people ran out of stones. Instead, people found better materials that met their needs. Throughout history, the discovery of new materials has led to breakthrough technological advancements. They have ranged from the discovery of bronze to create better tools and weapons to the discovery of semiconductors used in microelectronics. Historically, scientists and inventors have found new and better materials through a mix of intuition and trial-and-error. It can often take decades to find a useful, new material. The Materials Project aims to accelerate this process.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced a call for nominations for the 2025 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, one of the longest running and most prestigious science and technology awards given by the U.S. government.
A proton’s core consists of three valence quarks, but they contribute only a small fraction of the proton's mass. Most of the mass emerges from intricate quark dynamics and is primarily governed by the strong force mediated by gluons.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) initiated the competition for the management and operating contract for the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF).
At the Colorado School of Mines, Distinguished Professor in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Amy J. Clarke studies metals manufacturing. She observes how microscopic structures form and how processing conditions can be modified to affect solidification and defect development.
100 billion – there are at least that many stars in our Milky Way. It seems like an unimaginable number. Yet astrophysicists study structures in our universe that are far bigger than galaxies alone.
Scientists have new evidence that gluons have a positive spin polarization, meaning the spins of individual gluons are aligned in the same direction as the spin of the proton they are in.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science is pleased to announce that the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program is now accepting applications for the 2024 solicitation 1 cycle. Applications are due on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at 5:00 p.m. ET.
It may be snowy outside, but the water in the SNO+ experiment isn’t for building snowmen. SNO+ is short for the Sudbury Neutrino Observation+, a neutrino experiment 2 kilometers underground in a mine in Ontario, Canada.
Fixed numbers of protons and neutrons can rearrange themselves within a nucleus. The gamma ray transitions from this reshuffling connect excited quantum energy levels, and the pattern in these connections provide a unique “fingerprint” for each isotope.
For scientists to probe materials with electron beams, they require software, such as the finite element for software called Computational Fluid Dynamics, used by Silviu Covrig Dusa to make precision measurements at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.
Collisions of high energy particles produce “jets” of quarks, anti-quarks, or gluons. The quarks can’t be directly detected, but simulations indicate that the jets modify the quantum vacuum and that the produced quarks retain entanglement.
Scientists have developed a new way to study the shapes of atomic nuclei and their building blocks by modeling the production of particles produced in high-energy electron-nucleus collisions in the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).
Joshua Zide and his team at the University of Delaware are taking a new approach to materials, making metallic nanoparticles separately from films and then incorporating them. It turns semiconductors into nanocomposites with different properties and new applications.
Humans store water in huge metal towers and deep concrete reservoirs. But nature’s water storage is much more scenic – the snowpack that tops majestic mountains.
Semiconductors in photoelectrochemical cells can convert water into hydrogen for fuel. To develop this technology, researchers have developed a technique to measure these devices’ photovoltage, or energy output, quantitively. The technique avoids the difficulty of attaching wires to the front of the semiconductors in contact with water.