Welcome to Neutrino Alley: Q&A with ORNL’s Marcel Demarteau
Oak Ridge National LaboratoryMarcel Demarteau is director of the Physics Division at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Marcel Demarteau is director of the Physics Division at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
A combination of astrophysical measurements has allowed researchers to put new constraints on the radius of a typical neutron star and provide a novel calculation of the Hubble constant that indicates the rate at which the universe is expanding.
Led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a new study clears up a discrepancy regarding the biggest contributor of unwanted background signals in specialized detectors of neutrinos.
Berkeley Lab has a long history of participating in neutrino experiments and discoveries in locations ranging from a site 1.3 miles deep at a nickel mine in Ontario, Canada, to an underground research site near a nuclear power complex northeast of Hong Kong, and a neutrino observatory buried in ice near the South Pole.
Results from the ProtoDUNE single-phase detector at CERN pave the way for detectors 20 times larger for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab.
More than 40 years since they launched, the Voyager spacecraft are still making discoveries.
The most powerful particle accelerators on Earth are research machines built on superconducting radiofrequency technology. These accelerators are expensive and difficult to operate. Scientists have now built an accelerator prototype that uses off-the-shelf support systems that demonstrates it is possible to build and run powerful non-research accelerators at a fraction of the cost of research accelerators.
David Ibbett, Fermilab’s first guest composer, converts real scientific data into musical notes and rhythms. His latest piece, “MicroBooNE,” will make its world premiere at a virtual concert on Dec. 8. In this audio interview, Ibbett shares a sneak peek of the song and explains his compositional process.
Researchers have developed a new theory for observing a quantum vacuum that could lead to new insights into the behaviour of black holes.
University of Pennsylvania physics professor Christopher Mauger measures neutrino properties, investigating the transformation of neutrinos between types. His work supports the long-baseline neutrino physics program DUNE - Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment - based in Illinois and South Dakota.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory investigated the binding properties of several hepatitis C drugs to determine how well they inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, a crucial protein enzyme that enables the novel coronavirus to reproduce. Inhibiting, or blocking, the protease from functioning is vital to stopping the virus from spreading in patients with COVID-19.
Magnets play a key role in looking for the direct transformation of muons into electrons, a theorized phenomenon that Fermilab's Mu2e experiment will hunt for when it comes online in 2023. In an important milestone, seven essential magnets have passed testing and been accepted for the construction of the experiment.
Large data sets require software specifically written to increase precision. Christian Bauer develops that software for new physics discoveries.
In a collaborative project with Fermilab, Argonne scientists mapped the magnetic field inside a vacuum with unprecedented accuracy. Results will be used in an experiment to shed light on the Standard Model of particle physics.
Borrowing a page from high-energy physics and astronomy textbooks, a team of physicists and computer scientists at Berkeley Lab has successfully adapted and applied a common error-reduction technique to the field of quantum computing.
For five years, a recycled MRI magnet has provided strong magnetic fields for cross-calibration and testing of equipment used in major physics experiments.
A relatively new method to control nuclear fusion that combines a massive jolt of electricity with strong magnetic fields and a powerful laser beam has achieved its own record output of neutrons — a key standard by which fusion efforts are judged — at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z pulsed power facility, the most powerful producer of X-rays on Earth.
A phenomenon of quantum mechanics known as superposition can impact timekeeping in high-precision clocks, according to a theoretical study from Dartmouth College, Saint Anselm College and Santa Clara University.
A new analysis, featuring important contributions by Berkeley Lab scientists, strongly supports the hypothesis that the Higgs boson interacts with muons, which are heavier siblings of electrons and the lightest particles yet to reveal evidence for these interactions.
A graduate student who will work with theorists at Jefferson Lab to better understand subatomic particles has received a supplemental research award from the DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program.
The red supergiant Betelgeuse is one of the best candidates for a nearby supernova in the coming decades. The star’s proximity to Earth would present a unique opportunity for studying the physics of supernovae and neutrinos. If Betelgeuse does explode, DUNE will be ready.
At the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, machine learning is opening new avenues to advance the lab’s unique scientific facilities and research.
Five researchers who are affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have been selected by their professional peers for the distinct honor of Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Fermilab and partners in northern Illinois have established the region as a leader in particle accelerator science and technology. Few places in the world boast such concentrated effort in particle acceleration research, developing and building cutting-edge particle accelerators, and growing an accelerator-focused workforce.
Fermilab scientists have implemented a cloud-based machine learning framework to handle data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Now they can begin to use graph neural networks to boost their pattern recognition abilities in the search for new particles.
Through a one-of-a-kind experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, nuclear physicists have precisely measured the weak interaction between protons and neutrons. The result quantifies the weak force theory as predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
Physicists from Lancaster University have established why objects moving through superfluid helium-3 lack a speed limit in a continuation of earlier Lancaster research.
Scientists are testing the components and systems for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, with other liquid-argon particle detectors. One such detector is ICEBERG, which is over 10,000 times smaller than DUNE will be. ICEBERG’s measurements are providing insight for future neutrino experiments.
Widely recognized for his work in accelerator beam physics, Shiltsev is one of 361 individuals elected to Academia Europaea, which promotes a wider appreciation of the value of European scholarship and research.
An international collaboration of theoretical physicists has published a new calculation relevant to the search for an explanation of the predominance of matter over antimatter in our universe. The new calculation gives a more accurate prediction for the likelihood with which kaons decay into a pair of electrically charged pions vs. a pair of neutral pions.
In a new study from Argonne, researchers have measured important beam properties that will help scientists develop more focused beams for high-impact science.
This award, totaling $2.5 million, will fund the development of a faster particle beam cooling method as well as the implementation of machine learning advancements to optimally control the system.
The origin of life on Earth is a topic that has piqued human curiosity since probably before recorded history began.
In the First-Person Science series, scientists describe how they made significant discoveries over years of research. Chris Polly is a physicist at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab and co-spokesperson for the Muon g-2 project.
The airborne transmission of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 via aerosol particles in indoor environment seems to be strongly influenced by relative humidity.
A new paradigm in particle accelerator design paves the way to dramatically smaller accelerators. The novel “dephasingless laser wakefield accelerator” concept uses a new technology called "flying focus." That combines special optics to shape an ultra-short, high-intensity laser pulse.
Hadrons are elusive superstars of the subatomic world, making up almost all visible matter, and British theoretical physicist Antoni Woss has worked diligently with colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility to get to know them better. Now, Woss’ doctoral thesis on spinning hadrons has earned him the 2019 Jefferson Science Associates Thesis Prize.
New porous catalyst with ultra-small fins facilitates molecular transport
Natalie Roe, who joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) as a postdoctoral fellow in 1989 and has served as Physics Division director since 2012, has been named the Lab’s Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for the Physical Sciences Area. Her appointment was approved by the University of California. The announcement follows an international search.
When stars explode as supernovas, they produce shock waves in the plasma that blast cosmic rays into the universe at relativistic speeds. How exactly they do that remains a mystery. New experiments using powerful lasers have recreated a miniature version of these supernova shocks in the lab, where scientists can observe how they accelerate particles.
New research findings about the origin of structure in the universe could lead to more connections between cosmology and the study of quantum information.
A new study dives into a decades-old discrepancy from a Standard Model of particle physics pillar known as “lepton flavor universality,” and provides strong evidence to resolve it.
Cynthia Keppel has been named a DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow. Based at DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, she is one of three DOE National Laboratory scientist fellows who will receive $1 million to devote to developing better detectors for science and medicine.
The method reveals that the lattice, which forms the major structural component of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is dynamic. The discovery of a diffusing lattice made from Gag and GagPol proteins, long considered to be completely static, opens up potential new therapies. The method can be applied to biomedical structure.
Fermilab scientists have broken their own world record for an accelerator magnet. In June, their demonstrator steering dipole magnet achieved a 14.5-tesla field, surpassing the field strength of their 14.1-tesla magnet, which set a record in 2019. This magnet test shows that scientists and engineers can meet the demanding requirements for the future particle collider under discussion in the particle physics community.
A team of Argonne scientists has devised a machine learning algorithm that calculates, with low computational time, how the ATLAS detector in the Large Hadron Collider would respond to the ten times more data expected with a planned upgrade in 2027.
Fermilab's popular outreach program for high school students, started in 1980, takes full advantage of modern technology to reach a broader audience. Recordings now are available online.
Researchers at the University of Tsukuba used computer calculations to design a new carbon-based material even harder than diamond.
Nobuo Sato is working to put the know in femto. He’s just been awarded a five-year, multimillion dollar research grant by the Department of Energy to develop a “FemtoAnalyzer” that will help nuclear physicists image the three-dimensional internal structure of protons and neutrons. Now, Sato is among 76 scientists nationwide who have been awarded a grant through the DOE Office of Science’s Early Career Research Program to pursue their research.
James “Jim” Fast has joined Jefferson Lab as the MOLLER Project Manager. MOLLER is the "Measurement of a Lepton-Lepton Electroweak Reaction" experiment that will measure the weak charge of the electron.