Feature Channels: Particle Physics

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The U.S. Department of Energy has given the greenlight for the MOLLER experiment to begin procurement of key components with its granting of Critical Decision-3A (CD-3A): Approve Long Lead Procurements. The determination allows the MOLLER project at Jefferson Lab to begin spending $9.14 million for long-lead procurements of critical items for which designs are complete. The MOLLER collaboration formed in 2006, and more than 100 physicists from more than 30 institutions are now involved. MOLLER will make a measurement of the electron’s weak charge that is five times more precise than any before. The electron’s weak charge is essentially how much influence the weak force exerts on the electron.

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Researchers at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering are working with scientists from the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) on a U.S. Department of Energy project to develop particle detectors that are sensitive enough to find these particles. The research, funded by a $350,000 grant, is part of a greater effort by the Department of Energy to explore the development of superconducting quantum detectors.

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After years of pioneering work, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have completed the detector towers that will soon sit at the heart of the SuperCDMS SNOLAB dark matter detection experiment.

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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.

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Rouven Essig is a theoretical particle physicist at Stony Brook University. He conceives new experiments and detection methods in the search for knowledge about dark matter.

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From a nanoscale grain of platinum, researchers made a first step in developing a tool that enables them to characterize the materials with a new level of detail, ultimately producing the best materials for the hydrogen production and use.

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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.

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Suying Jin, who is entering her sixth and planned final year as a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, won Princeton University’s honorific Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year.

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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.

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Brianna Romasky – who attended community college before moving to Australia, returning to the U.S. and enrolling at Rutgers–New Brunswick – is focused on plasma-based particle acceleration.

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

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Using a “spooky” phenomenon of quantum physics, Caltech researchers have discovered a way to double the resolution of light microscopes.

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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.

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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.

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Magnesium diboride (MgB2), a binary compound, behaves as a superconductor – a substance that offers no resistance to electric current flowing through it – at a moderate temperature of around 39 K (-234°C).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.