Scientists working in the lab have produced a signature nuclear reaction that occurs on the surface of a neutron star gobbling mass from a companion star. Their achievement improves understanding of stellar processes generating diverse nuclear isotopes.
Unoccupied aerial vehicles, better known as drones, have rapidly advanced from a quirky, high-flying novelty to a versatile workhorse.
Stuart Henderson, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, has again been named to the Hampton Roads Power List by Inside Business. According to Inside Business, the 2023 list salutes the people who are moving the needle for the Hampton Roads economy.
Kelly Chipps of Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been appointed to the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, which provides official advice to the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles produced in many types of radioactive decays, including in nuclear reactors. Because neutrinos interact with matter extremely weakly, they are impossible to shield. The SNO+ experiment has just shown that a detector filled with simple water can detect neutrinos from nuclear reactors, even though the neutrinos create only tiny signals in the detector.
Nonfood, plant-based biofuels have potential as a green alternative to fossil fuels, but the enzymes required for production are too inefficient and costly to produce. However, new research is shining a light on enzymes from fungi that could make biofuels economically viable.
The start of this year’s physics run at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) also marks the start of a new era. For the first time since RHIC began operating at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2000, a brand new detector, known as sPHENIX, will track what happens when the nuclei of gold atoms smash into one another at nearly the speed of light. RHIC’s STAR detector, which has been running and evolving since 2000, will also see some firsts in Run 23.
Some mesons (quark-antiquark pairs) that emerge from a hot soup of matter generated in collisions of atomic nuclei appear to have a preferential “global spin alignment.” The spin preference cannot be explained by conventional mechanisms. A new model suggests that local fluctuations in the strong force may play a role in triggering the preference. The global spin alignment measurements may give scientists a new way to study local fluctuations in the strong force, which is the strongest and least understood of the four fundamental forces in nature.
Experts in high-performance computing and data management are gathering in Norfolk next week for the 26th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP2023). Held approximately every 18 months, this high-impact conference will be held at the Norfolk Marriott Waterside in Norfolk, Va., May 8-12. CHEP2023 is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in nearby Newport News, Va. This is the first in-person CHEP conference to be held since 2019.
Researchers at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and their collaborators recently measured the masses of several key nuclei with high-precision by employing a state-of-the-art storage-ring mass spectrometry technique.
The Electron-Ion Collider Center at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (EIC Center at Jefferson Lab) has announced the winners of six new research fellowships. Over the next year, the fellows will work to advance the science program and further the research of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). The EIC is a unique physics research facility dedicated to answering fundamental questions about nature’s building blocks.
Argonne research is informing smart infrastructure that can support the electric grid.
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.
A crowd gathers around a black wooden box that resembles a short refrigerator, waiting for the motion of a pair of robotic arms sitting just outside the box.
Fusion energy researchers use a technique called Gas-Puff Imaging (GPI) to visualize an important phenomenon in tokamak devices involving turbulence in plasma magnetic confinement fields. This technique can generate roughly 1 million frames of visual data, far too much for humans to analyze by eye. Scientists recently tested a machine-learning based approach for analyzing GPI images. The system provides detailed, time- and space-resolved information and could aid in design and operation of future fusion power devices.
The state-of-the-art sPHENIX detector is fully assembled and gearing up to grab particle collision snapshots. The completion of assembly marks the detector’s transition from a construction project to running experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
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.
Thanks to the hard work of Argonne experts and worldwide partners, the safety and availability of medical radioisotopes is far more secure.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory partnered early on to take on the design and construction of the Electron-Ion Collider. Now, Jefferson Lab is proud to announce it has appointed a dedicated EIC project manager: James Fast will lead Jefferson Lab’s EIC project team. The Electron-Ion Collider, to be built at Brookhaven, is led by EIC Project Director Jim Yeck and EIC Project Manager Luisella Lari.
Experts in nuclear physics and quantum information have demonstrated the application of a photon-number-resolving system to accurately resolve more than 100 photons. The feat is a major step forward in capability for quantum computing development efforts. It also may enable quantum generation of truly random numbers, a long-sought goal for developing unbreakable encryption techniques for applications in, for instance, military communications and financial transactions.
Idaho National Laboratory is poised to lend its deep bench of experts to a new resource for states wanting to learn more about advanced nuclear energy deployment.
Neutrinos are involved in a process named beta decay that involves a neutron converting into a proton emitting an electron and an antineutrino. There may also be an ultra-rare kind of beta decay that emits two electrons but no neutrinos, called neutrinoless-double beta decay (NLDBD). Researchers are using the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) to search for these rare NLDBD processes using different nuclei. Scientists have reported new tests using Tellurim-128 to look for NLDBD.
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.
Businessman and international investor Arif Efendi shares his thoughts on the positive implications of global renewable energy efforts.
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.
If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at a world-renowned research center for nuclear physics, now’s your chance to find out! With an interactive map, viewers can now virtually visit the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.
To understand quark-gluon plasma, theorists compare a sophisticated model to a large amount of experimental data. One of the parameters in this model is the size of the nucleons inside the two colliding lead nuclei. Low-energy experiments find a nucleon size of around 0.5 femtometers, while heavy ion experimental data have found a much larger nucleon size, of about 1 femtometers. A new analysis of heavy ion experimental data includes the experimentally measured reaction rate of lead-lead collisions to arrive at a nucleon size of 0.6 femtometers.
Time Magazine has named Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory design physicist Andrea “Annie” Kritcher to its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Kritcher is recognized for her role as principal designer for the December 2022 fusion ignition experiment at NIF.
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.
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.
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.
Researchers developed a novel approach that observes dissipative scattering reactions to investigate discrete energy levels in an excited exotic nucleus. These energy levels are the nucleus’ unique fingerprint. The researchers observed unusual excited levels in calcium-38. These levels appear to be due to the simultaneous excitation of several protons and neutrons.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has issued a call for nominations for the 2024 Enrico Fermi Presidential Award. One of the most prestigious science and technology awards bestowed by the U.S. government, the Fermi Award recognizes individual(s) of international stature for exceptional scientific, technical, policy, and/or management achievements related to the broad missions of the DOE and its programs to address energy, environmental and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions.
Nuclear physicists may have finally pinpointed where in the proton a large fraction of its mass resides. A recent experiment carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has revealed the radius of the proton’s mass that is generated by the strong force as it glues together the proton’s building block quarks. The result was recently published in Nature.
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration announced Darleane C. Hoffman and Gabor A. Somorjai as recipients of the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award, one of the oldest and most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed by the U.S. government.
Better methods for detecting and treating disease. Groundbreaking technologies for monitoring and blocking radiation. New techniques for removing forever chemicals from wastewater. These research and development activities and more are being pursued by innovators at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. And today, they are being brought together to form the lab’s new Biomedical Research & Innovation Center (BRIC).
Studying the electronic structure of actinide elements can help advance the future of nuclear materials. A new study of several plutonium hybrid materials found that the bonds between these elements were predominantly ionic but also involved covalent bonding associated with the 5f electron shell. This research contributes to the collective goal of resolving the f-electron challenge, the goal of the Department of Energy Office of Science’s Heavy Element Chemistry program.
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.
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.
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.
Atomic nuclei accelerated close to the speed of light become dense walls of gluons known as color glass condensate (CGC). Recent analysis shows that CGC shares features with black holes, enormous conglomerates of gravitons that exert gravitational force across the universe. Both gluons in CGC and gravitons in black holes are organized in the most efficient manner possible for each system’s energy and size.
A new simulation approach named eTLE aims to improve the precision of a primary tool for estimating neutron behaviours in 3D space. This study examines the approach in detail – validating its reliability in predicting the scattering of neutrons in crystalline media.
Balendra Sutharshan has been named chief operating officer for Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He will begin serving as ORNL’s deputy for operations and as executive vice president, operations, for UT-Battelle effective April 1.
On March 17, Sandia National Laboratories Director Dr. James Peery will make an historic visit to Navajo Technical University in Crownpoint, New Mexico, marking the first time a sitting national lab director has visited a tribal college or university. The event is designed to build on the growing partnership Sandia has started with NTU.
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.
At Idaho National Laboratory, computational scientists use INL’s supercomputers to perform “virtual experiments” to accomplish research that couldn’t be done by conventional means. While supercomputing can’t replace traditional experiments, supercomputing is an essential component of all modern scientific discoveries and advancements.
Registration is now open for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) summer science education programs. Summer programming includes opportunities for both teachers and students.
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.
Using the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS), a team of scientists is studying the environment created during laser shots at the National Ignition Facility to better understand its potential as a testbed for nuclear astrophysics research.
The city of Kemmerer, Wyoming, home to a coal-fired power plant that is slated for retirement in 2025, has found itself in the spotlight as the center of a new kind of clean energy project.
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