Feature Channels: Nuclear Physics

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Accelerator physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have successfully implemented an innovative scheme for increasing proton collision rates at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). More proton collisions at this DOE Office of Science User Facility produce more data for scientists to sift through to answer important nuclear physics questions, including the search for the source of proton spin.

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With the production of 50 grams of plutonium-238, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have restored a U.S. capability dormant for nearly 30 years and set the course to provide power for NASA and other missions.

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An ultra-high-resolution technique used for the first time to study polymer fibers that trap uranium in seawater may cause researchers to rethink the best methods to harvest this potential fuel for nuclear reactors.

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New charge breeding techniques produce beams of radioactive ions that can be accelerated to induce nuclear reactions, providing the opportunity to explore aspects of the nuclear force and to study in the laboratory some of the processes creating the elements in stellar environments.

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The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by Arthur B. McDonald, the leader of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, and Takaaki Kajita, a leader of the Super-Kamiokande collaboration, for discovering neutrino oscillations, showing that neutrinos have mass.

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Accelerated ion beams heat up. This causes a problem for physicists trying to get the particles to collide. So physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a nuclear physics research facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, are exploring ways to cool the beams and keep their particles tightly packed.

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Peering into the seething soup of primordial matter created in particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- an "atom smasher" dedicated to nuclear physics research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory -- scientists have come to a new understanding of how particles are produced in these collisions.

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Article about a proposed plasma-based method for treating nuclear waste.

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This article describes the discovery of two new sources of turbulence in compact spherical tokamaks.

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A new Intermediate Energy X-ray (IEX) beamline at sector 29 of the APS will open users January 2016.

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Peering at the debris from particle collisions that recreate the conditions of the very early universe, scientists have for the first time measured the force of interaction between pairs of antiprotons. Like the force that holds ordinary protons together within the nuclei of atoms, the force between antiprotons is attractive and strong. The experiments were conducted at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory and will publish in Nature.

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To uncover the secrets of neutrinos, scientists build massive detectors to help them spot these elusive particles. The latest, dubbed MicroBooNE, recently spotted its first accelerator-born neutrino event candidates at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Scientists from nearly 30 institutions, including the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, collaborate on this experiment.

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Nestled inside the massive MicroBooNE detector, part of a new neutrino experiment just getting underway at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, lie 50 circuit boards packed with custom-built microelectronics. These circuits were designed by engineers at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory to operate while immersed in liquid argon, a cryogenic liquid that boils at a biting -186 degrees Celsius or -303 degrees Fahrenheit.

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The recently commissioned MicroBooNE experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has reached a major milestone: It detected its first neutrinos on Oct. 15, marking the beginning of detailed studies of these fundamental particles whose properties could be linked to dark matter, matter’s dominance over antimatter in the universe and the evolution of the entire cosmos since the Big Bang.

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A team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory computed distributions in calcium-48, and revealed that the difference between the radii of neutron and proton distributions (called the “neutron skin”) is considerably smaller than previously thought.

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In a research lab in Germany, researchers are preparing to switch on a 52-foot wide fusion device called a stellarator, that could change the game in fusion energy.

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Today the MicroBooNE collaboration announced that it has seen its first neutrinos in the experiment's newly built detector, the first big step on its quest to spot the theorized fourth type of neutrino.

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In March 2011 at Fukushima, the fuel’s cladding, a zirconium alloy used to contain the fuel and radioactive fission products, reacted with boiling coolant water to form hydrogen gas, which then exploded, resulting in the biggest nuclear power-related disaster since Chernobyl. Challenged by this event, two research teams have made progress in developing fuel claddings that are capable of withstanding the high temperatures resulting from a Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA), like that at Fukushima. Both teams will present their results at the AVS 62nd International Symposium and Exhibition, held Oct. 18-23 in San Jose, Calif.

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The Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, or NSAC, has publicly released “Reaching for the Horizon, The 2015 Long Range Plan for Nuclear Science.” The new plan was unanimously accepted by NSAC, a committee composed of eminent scientists who have been tasked by DOE and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide recommendations on future research in the field.

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In 2014, the Majorana Demonstrator (MJD) started its search for neutrinoless double beta decay. Observation of this decay would have profound implications for our understanding of physics, including providing hints as to how the Big Bang produced more matter than it did antimatter.

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How long do neutrons live? The answer could change how we think everything from the cosmos to coffee cups. Yet, scientists don’t agree on the neutron longevity. The disagreement is fanned by the limitations of today’s instruments. Now, a highly efficient detector is helping to resolve the puzzle.

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Dramatic increases in ionization efficiencies for uranium, thorium, and palladium, which were made possible with RILIS, enable new studies relevant to nuclear fuels cycles, neutrino detection, and isotope production.

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Scientists intent on unraveling the mystery of the force that binds the building blocks of visible matter are gathered in Kobe, Japan, this week to present and discuss the latest results from "ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions." Known more colloquially as Quark Matter 2015, the conference convenes scientists studying smashups of nuclei traveling close to the speed of light at the world's premier particle colliders-the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, https://www.bnl.gov/rhic/) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN).

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Through an allocation by the DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge, a team of condensed matter theorists at Rutgers University, led by Professors Gabriel Kotliar and Kristjan Haule, used nearly 10 million Titan core hours to calculate the electronic and magnetic structure of plutonium using a combination of density functional theory calculations and the leading-edge dynamical mean field theory technique.

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One of the most long-lived and active space-chip testing programs is at the Berkeley Lab. Since 1979, most American satellites and many major NASA projects including the Mars Rover Curiosity, the space shuttles, and the new Orion capsule, have had one or more electronic components go through Berkeley Lab's cyclotron.

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New data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider confirm that small nuclei can create tiny droplets of a perfect liquid primordial soup when they collide with larger nuclei.

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A suppression of strange quark production relative to up and down quark production had previously been noted; for the first time, the result has been verified when a single pair is produced.

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Surprisingly, smaller particles colliding with large nuclei appear to produce tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma. Recent results show that the tiny droplets behave like a liquid not the expected gas. The results support the case that these small particles produce tiny drops of the primordial soup.

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Researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have sorted through the billions of subatomic particles that zip through its frozen cubic-kilometer-sized detector each year to gather powerful new evidence in support of 2013 observations confirming the existence of cosmic neutrinos. The evidence is important because it heralds a new form of astronomy using neutrinos, the nearly massless high-energy particles generated in nature’s accelerators: black holes, massive exploding stars and the energetic cores of galaxies.

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A team led by James Vary of Iowa State University simulated clusters of neutrons called “neutron drops” to understand their properties better. The ab initio calculations, or calculations based on fundamental forces and principles, were performed on the Titan supercomputer at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Titan is the flagship machine of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Leveraging Titan’s massive memory and computing power, the team was able to determine the ground-state energies and other properties of systems of up to 40 neutrons. The results were published in the December 2014 issue of Physics Letters B.

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Groundbreaking work at two Department of Energy national laboratories has confirmed plutonium’s magnetism, which scientists have long theorized but have never been able to experimentally observe.

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Other topics include autism research, biofuel sources, nutrition supplements, and more...

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At the beginning of June, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European research facility, began smashing together protons once again. Physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory were busy throughout Long Shutdown 1, undertaking projects designed to maximize the LHC’s chances of detecting rare new physics as the collider reaches into a previous unexplored subatomic frontier.

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Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed a detailed model of the source of a puzzling limitation on fusion reactions. The findings, published this month in Physics of Plasmas, complete and confirm previous PPPL research and could lead to steps to overcome the barrier if the model proves consistent with experimental data.

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Topics include: women's health, cancer care, research at the Large Hadron Collider, dementia drug treatment, dermatology, skin cancer, breast cancer, smoking risks, and genetics.

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A basic characteristic of elementary particles, spin is used daily in certain imaging techniques; yet, previous studies of the mechanics behind proton spin did not add up. An experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider shows how the characteristics of an antiquark, a constituent of the proton, contribute to proton spin.

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Two radioisotopes, lead-212 and bismuth-212, are of interest in targeted cancer therapies, but the short-lived radioisotopes were becoming hard to acquire until the DOE Isotope Program recently began producing the appropriate generators.

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Colliding lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider creates tiny samples of matter at energy densities that have not occurred since microseconds after the Big Bang. At these densities, ordinary matter melts into its primordial constituents of quarks and gluons. To explore the properties of this plasma of quarks and gluons as it expands and cools, a new Di-Jet Calorimeter was installed at the collider.

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New research in theoretical physics shows that black holes aren't the ruthless killers we've made them out to be, but instead benign--if imperfect--hologram generators.

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Scientists have observed, in metals for the first time, transient excitons – the primary response of free electrons to light. Detecting excitons in metals could provide clues on how light is turned into energy in solar cells and plants.

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Scientists in the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a particle accelerator exploring nuclear physics and the building blocks of matter at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, have new evidence for what's called a "chiral magnetic wave" rippling through the soup of quark-gluon plasma created in RHIC's energetic particle smashups. The findings are described in a paper that will be highlighted as an Editors' Suggestion in Physical Review Letters.

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Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez is a run field manager who coordinates experiments that smash particles together at near the speed of light.

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Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have for the first time simulated the formation of structures called "plasmoids" during Coaxial Helicity Injection (CHI), a process that could simplify the design of fusion facilities known as tokamaks. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have for the first time simulated the formation of structures called "plasmoids" during Coaxial Helicity Injection (CHI), a process that could simplify the design of fusion facilities known as tokamaks. The findings, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, involve the formation of plasmoids in the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions. These round structures carry current that could eliminate the need for solenoids – large magnetic coils that wind down the center of today's tokamaks – to initiate the plasma and complete the magnetic field that confines the hot gas. "Understanding this

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For the first time, researchers have shown that momentum-hogging protons can exist in nuclei heavier than carbon.

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Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: genetics and cancer, diabetes and blindness, nanotech, engineering, personalized medicine, energy, and e-cigarettes.

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This new result has allowed researchers to determine the reason behind a large discrepancy in the data between two different methods used to measure the proton’s electric form factor.

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First identified more than 50 years ago, the sub-atomic particle called Lambda(1405) was routinely seen in experiments, yet two of its key characteristics were too difficult to measure. For the first time, scientists measured these descriptors: intrinsic angular momentum and parity.

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Atoms and the electrons that hold them together store energy in their electronic bonding structure and in their atomic vibrations. X-ray laser scattering techniques have been used to measure and track the transfer of energy from one atomic-scale storage mode to another.