University of Washington researchers have developed a method that uses a gaming graphics card to control plasma formation in their prototype fusion reactor.
Sandia National Laboratories is developing a new kind of imaging system that will enable people to safely examine sealed metal boxes when opening them could be dangerous.
The slow neutron-capture process (the s-process) in nucleosynthesis results in about half of the elements heavier than iron in the universe. Two important reactions in the s-process are Neon-22 (alpha, gamma) and Neon-22 (alpha, neutron), which affect the abundances of elements such as Selenium, Krypton, Rubidium, Strontium, and Zirconium. Researchers recently used two indirect methods to study the reactions.
For the first time, the long-theorized neutron-clustering effect in nuclear reactors has been demonstrated, which could improve reactor safety and create more accurate simulations, according to a new study recently published in the journal Nature Communications Physics.
Thirteen universities working on a new experiment to be carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have recently been awarded new grants totaling more than $9 million. The grants come from the National Science Foundation and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, with a matching award for the CFI grant from Research Manitoba. The grants benefit the Measurement of a Lepton-Lepton Electroweak Reaction Experiment, called MOLLER.
Aluminum-26 has a quantum state difficult to study in a lab. Scientists instead use ion beam-target interactions to create an environment that adds a neutron to the radioactive isotope Silicon-26 to study excited quantum states in Silicon-27. This approach is possible because of the symmetry between protons and neutrons. This provides rare insight into processes in stars.
Imagine a dust particle in a storm cloud, and you can get an idea of a neutron's insignificance compared to the magnitude of the molecule it inhabits.
Brand new, state-of-the-art components for an upgraded 1000-ton particle detector are being installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. Known as sPHENIX, the detector is a radical makeover of the PHENIX experiment, which first began taking data at the Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in 2000.
Since its founding, Argonne has employed and partnered with innovators whose contributions have dramatically pushed the frontiers of our understanding and improved the world.
Argonne’s Maria Goeppert Mayer is one of only four women to win the Nobel Prize in physics. Today, on her 115th birthday, Argonne announces the award of its 2022 Maria Goeppert Mayer Fellowship to four outstanding early-career doctoral scientists.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded over $2.85 million with a focus on broadening and diversifying the nuclear and particle physics research communities through research traineeships for undergraduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other Minority Serving Institutions.
Three virtual public events during the week of June 28 will mark Argonne’s 75th anniversary. Events will spotlight U.S. Department of Energy national user facilities; the next 75 years; the road to decarbonization; and a lighthearted look at the lab.
The U.S. Department of Energy has selected Iowa State's Srimoyee Sen for an early career award that will help her study nuclear physics and quantum phenomena. The research could lead to the discovery of new materials that could one day contribute to speedy quantum computing or other applications.
Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has awarded Codeplay a contract implementing the oneAPI DPC++ compiler, an implementation of the SYCL open standard software, to support AMD GPU-based high-performance compute (HPC) supercomputers.
As the Deputy Group Leader of the Nuclear Data and Theory Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sofia Quaglioni is contributing to a unified understanding of the structure and lower-energy reactions of light nuclei.
Scientists demonstrate how ground-breaking image reconstruction and analysis algorithms filter out cosmic ray tracks in the MicroBooNE neutrino detector to pinpoint elusive neutrino interactions with unprecedented clarity.
A machine learning system is helping operators resolve routine faults at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). The system monitors the accelerator cavities, where faults can trip off the CEBAF. The system identified which cavities were tripping off about 85% of the time and identified the type of fault about 78% of the time.
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory team has taken a closer look at how nuclear weapon blasts close to the Earth’s surface create complications in their effects and apparent yields. Attempts to correlate data from events with low heights of burst revealed a need to improve the theoretical treatment of strong blast waves rebounding from hard surfaces.
Chun Shen, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Wayne State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was awarded a five-year, $750,000 award from the U.S. Department of Energy's Early Career Research Program for his project, “Quantitative Characterization of Emerging Quark-Gluon Plasma Properties with Dynamical Fluctuations and Small Systems.”
Scientists don’t know how exotic hadrons with a larger number of quarks are structured—are they tightly bound hadrons or a compound of two hadrons similar to molecules? Now, scientists have developed a new technique to identify the nature of the χc1(3872, a four-quark hadron. This is the first time scientists have discovered the structure of a particle by observing how it interacts with nearby particles.
Mark B. Chadwick, chief scientist and chief operating officer of Weapons Physics, and Stuart A. Maloy, deputy group leader for Materials Science at Radiation and Dynamic Extremes, were named fellows, while D.V. Rao, program director for the Laboratory’s Civilian Nuclear Program, earned a special award for making advanced nuclear energy systems a reality.
Six Argonne scientists receive Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program Awards.
A new analysis of collisions of gold ions shows signs of a “critical point,” a change in the way one form of matter changes into another. The results hint at changes in the type of transition during the shift from particles to the quark-and-gluon “soup” that filled the early universe. This helps scientists understand how particles interact and what holds them together.
Some meteorites contain microscopic grains of stardust created by nucleosynthesis before our solar system existed. Many grains contain sulfur isotopes that are clues to the grains’ origins in novae and supernovae. Sulfur production from nucleosynthesis depends on the prior production of argon-34. Scientists created and studied argon-34 and established criteria for determining whether particular grains originated in novae or supernovae.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $10 million for interdisciplinary research in Quantum Information Science (QIS) and nuclear physics.
Nuclear physicists have made a new, highly accurate measurement of the thickness of the neutron “skin” that encompasses the lead nucleus in experiments conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and just published in Physical Review Letters. The result, which revealed a neutron skin thickness of .28 millionths of a nanometer, has important implications for the structure and size of neutron stars.
The discovery that the nebulae surrounding the most powerful pulsars are pumping out ultra-high-energy gamma rays could rewrite the book about the rays’ galactic origins. Pulsars are rapidly rotating, highly magnetized collapsed stars surrounded by nebulae powered by winds generated inside the pulsars.
Three unused, 48,000-pound stainless steel canisters arrived at PNNL, bringing the chance to deepen research in spent nuclear fuel storage and transportation.
Pions consist of a quark paired to an antiquark and are the lightest particles to experience the strong force. But until recently scientists did not understand pions’ internal structure because of their short lifespan. Now, an advance in supercomputer calculations using lattice Quantum Chromodynamics may allow scientists to provide an accurate and precise description of pion structure for the first time.
A new project at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility will use a quantum simulator to model experiments at the Electron-Ion Collider. This device uses quantum computing to simulate carefully crafted models of experiments that are being proposed for the collider.
Nuclear physicist Caroline Nesaraja of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory evaluates nuclear data. Her work ensures that the scientific community has the best nuclear data for fundamental research and applications including medical isotopes, nuclear energy and national and international security.
What do you need to study the fine details of the building blocks of matter? A new kind of particle accelerator called an Electron-Ion Collider, planned to be built in the United States over the next decade, and a state-of-the-art detector to capture the action when electrons and ions collide.
The events following the Fukushima disaster, a decade ago, drew upon Berkeley Lab’s long-standing expertise in radiation measurements and safety, and led to the creation of long-term radiation-monitoring programs, both locally and in Japan, as well as a series of radiation surveys and technology demonstrations including drone- and helicopter-based surveys, and vehicle-based and hand-carried measurements.
In principle, the universe should contain objects composed only of gluons in a sea of quark-antiquark pairs. However, scientists’ experiments have never definitively confirmed these hypothetical objects, called “glueballs.” Now, scientists are using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to search for signs of these glueballs.
A new analysis of collisions conducted at different energies at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) shows tantalizing signs of a critical point—a change in the way that quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, transform from one phase to another. The findings will help physicists map out details of these nuclear phase changes to better understand the evolution of the universe and the conditions in the cores of neutron stars.
Scientists of the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (LPI RAS), the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Institute for Nuclear Research of RAS (INR RAS) studied the arrival directions of astrophysical neutrinos with energies more than a trillion electronvolts (TeV) and came to an unexpected conclusion: all of them are born near black holes in the centers of distant active galaxies powerful radio sources.
While protons populate the nucleus of every atom in the universe, sometimes they can be squeezed into a smaller size and slip out of the nucleus for a romp on their own. Observing these squeezed protons may offer unique insights into the particles that build our universe. Now, researchers hunting for these squeezed protons have come up empty-handed, suggesting there’s more to the phenomenon than first thought. The result was recently published in Physical Review Letters.
The results of a new experiment could shift research of the proton by reviving previously discarded theories of its inner workings.
Just prior to the start of this year's run at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a team of scientists, engineers, technicians, and students completed the installation of important new components of the collider's STAR detector. The new components will expand STAR’s ability to track jets of particles emerging in an extreme “forward” direction to give scientists insight into how the internal components of protons and neutrons—quarks and gluons—contribute to the overall properties of these building blocks of matter.
A team used two DOE supercomputers to complete simulations of the full-power ITER fusion device and found that the component that removes exhaust heat from ITER may be more likely to maintain its integrity than was predicted by the current trend of fusion devices.
A major injector upgrade at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility was well underway early last year when the pandemic hit, throwing scientists and their long-anticipated project for a loop. Literally overnight, they had to leave their desks, control room and colleagues behind and rapidly learn how to work together from the confines of their own homes.
The 10 year anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident occurs in March.
PNNL's Jan Strube and colleagues from Germany and Japan outline the future of particle physics research using linear colliders, which could improve our understanding of dark matter and help answer fundamental questions about the universe.
A calculation so complex that it takes twenty years to complete on a powerful desktop computer can now be done in one hour on a regular laptop.
Recent research on the neutron-proton (np) reaction could help us understand the age of the Earth and build less expensive nuclear power plants. The np reaction plays a role in potassium-argon dating and in the removal of neutrons from nuclear reactor cores, leading to core shutdown. In recent studies, nuclear scientists used a new neutron source to show that np reaction rates occur in ways very different from scientists’ initial expectations.
Scientists have identified three distinct shapes in stable nickel-64 that appear as energy is added to the nucleus. The nucleus in the lowest-energy state is spherical, then takes elongated (prolate) and flattened (oblate) shapes as the protons and neutrons surrounding the nucleus gain energy. This demonstrates profound changes in the way protons and neutrons can arrange themselves.
One of the greatest mysteries in the universe is why the matter and anti-matter from the Big Bang did not all annihilate into pure energy. One scenario suggests a hypothetical, extremely rare nuclear decay where an atomic nucleus decays by emitting two electrons, creating additional matter. This paper reports on recent progress on related experiments.
Accelerator physicists are preparing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, for its 21st year of experiments, set to begin on or about February 3, 2021. Instead of producing high-energy particle smashups, the goal for this run is to maximize collision rates at the lowest energy ever achieved at RHIC.
The Department of Energy has announced that Susannah Tringe and Dan Kasen, two scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), will receive the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, one of DOE’s highest honors. Additionally, former Berkeley Lab scientist M. Zahid Hasan was also named as one of the eight recipients.
Artificial intelligence is a game-changer in nuclear physics, able to enhance and accelerate fundamental research and analysis by orders of magnitude. DOE's Jefferson Lab is exploring the expanding synergy between nuclear physics and computer science as it co-hosts together with The Catholic University of America and the University of Maryland a virtual weeklong series of lectures and hands-on exercises Jan. 11-15 for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and even “absolute beginners.”
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