Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $16 million for fifteen projects that will implement artificial intelligence methods to accelerate scientific discovery in nuclear physics research.
Scientists have found a mathematical shortcut that could help harness fusion energy, a potential source of clean electricity that could mitigate floods, heat waves, and other rising effects of climate change.
Argonne researchers obtain nine awards from the U.S. Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy University Program and Integrated Research projects, propelling innovation and advancing nuclear technology.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Timothy Gray led a study that may have revealed an unexpected change in the shape of an atomic nucleus. The finding could affect our understanding of what holds nuclei together, how protons and neutrons interact and how elements form.
Supporters of nuclear energy tout the safety and reliability of nuclear power, and data supports their claims.
As quantum computing advances, scientists want to know how it may be better able to solve complex problems than today’s conventional computers. This research applied quantum computing to determine different energy levels for nuclei of lithium-6. This work shows how to solve a historic nuclear physics research problem on present-day commercially available quantum computer hardware.
Argonne obtains DOE funding for three transformative clean energy projects, revolutionizing geothermal power plants, advancing safety analysis for advanced nuclear reactors and driving the commercialization of used nuclear fuel recycling.
Atomic nuclei consist of nucleons such as protons and neutrons, which are bound together by nuclear force or strong interaction. This force allows protons and neutrons to form bound states; however, when only two neutrons are involved, the attractive force is slightly insufficient to create such a state.
A collaboration of nuclear theorists has used supercomputers to predict the spatial distributions of charges, momentum, and other properties of "up" and "down" quarks within protons. The calculations show that the up quark is more symmetrically distributed and spread over a smaller distance than the down quark.
Xiao-Ying Yu, a distinguished scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named a Fellow of AVS, the American Vacuum Society.
One approach to the question of why matter is more abundant than antimatter in our observable universe is observing an extremely rare nuclear process called neutrinoless double-beta decay. The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR experiment was designed to detect this decay. Although it did not observe the decay, it achieved world-leading energy resolutions and showed the feasibility of using a larger detector to search for the hypothesized decay.
The Hi'CT system, a compact segmented full digital tomography detector utilizing silicon pixel sensors, represents a significant breakthrough in heavy-ion radiotherapy.
PNNL scientists design a highly sensitive neutrino detector for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.
Peter Hurck has been searching for strange particles, named such because they contain strange quarks, since beginning work on his Ph.D. As the 2023 Jefferson Science Associates (JSA) Postdoctoral Prize winner, he’ll continue conducting data analyses to identify strange particles and learn about their properties at Jefferson Lab.
Allison Zec has been awarded the 2022 JSA Thesis Prize for recounting experiments that achieved the world record in the precise measurement of an electron beam’s polarization. Since 1999, the prize has been awarded to the top doctoral dissertation on research related to Jefferson Lab science. The prize is funded by the JSA Initiatives Fund program, which supports programs, initiatives and activities that further the scientific outreach and promote the science, education and technology missions of Jefferson Lab, and which benefit the laboratory’s scientific user community.
Putting a suite of new materials synthesis and characterization methods to the test, a team of scientists from the University of Iowa and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has developed 14 organic-inorganic hybrid materials, seven of which are entirely new. These uranium-based materials, as well as the detailed report of their bonding mechanisms, will help advance clean energy solutions, including safe nuclear energy.
Scientists have demonstrated experimentally a long-theorized relationship between electron and nuclear motion in molecules, which could lead to the design of materials for solar cells, electronic displays and other applications that can make use of this powerful quantum phenomenon.
The International Standards Organization has put its stamp of approval on 18 nuclear analytical chemistry methods at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These testing and calibration methods have received ISO 17025 accreditation.
Idaho National Laboratory intern Jake Guidry has developed a cybersecurity research tool that could improve the security of electric vehicle charging.
New research published in Science Advances, led by Yuan Yang, associate professor of materials science at Columbia Engineering, and collaborators at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, demonstrates a novel technique for isolating isotopes.
Idaho National Laboratory’s International Researcher and Visitor Program drives cross-cultural exchange and promotes collaboration with worldwide scientists and academia inspiring creativity within INL’s scientific community.
Researchers recently reviewed the current standard procedure to determine the nuclear weak distribution, which describes the distribution of active protons in a nucleus. The new analysis found significant differences with previous model-based determinations of the nuclear weak distribution. The results provide a partial explanation for a discrepancy between predictions from particle physics theory and experimental measurement of a fundamental quantity.
MIT team worked with fermions in the form of potassium-40 atoms, and under conditions that simulate the behavior of electrons in certain superconducting materials.
Nuclei can absorb energy, pushing the nuclei into excited states. When these states decay, the nuclei emit different particles. The interplay between these decay channels and the internal characteristics of the excited states gives rise to phenomena such as superradiance. In superradiance, a nucleus with high excitation energy has excited states so dense that neighboring excited states overlap. Scientists recently found evidence of the superradiance effect in the differences between decaying states in Oxygen-18 and Neon-18.
The Department of Energy (DOE) today signed an implementation agreement with Sweden to further promote and facilitate basic science research in energy and related fields.
New measurements of how particles flow from collisions of different types of particles at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have provided new insights into the origin of the shape of hot specks of matter generated in these collisions. The results may lead to a deeper understanding of the properties and dynamics of this form of matter, known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP).
Supported by his Early Career Research Program award, physicist Junjie Zhu’s work at the CERN Large Hadron Collider led to the first-ever evidence of two rare but important physics processes. These interactions produce the particles responsible for nuclear decay.
Batteries play a pivotal role in the world’s mission to reach net-zero carbon emissions, from electric vehicles to grid-scale electricity storage to home use.
Ensuring that countries abide by future nuclear arms agreements will be a vital task. Now, PPPL researchers have helped devise an automated way to ensure compliance.
A new publication by the PHENIX Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) provides definitive evidence that gluon “spins” are aligned in the same direction as the spin of the proton they’re in. The result, just published in Physical Review Letters, provides theorists with new input for calculating how much gluons—the gluelike particles that hold quarks together within protons and neutrons—contribute to a proton’s spin.
Molten salt has caught the eye of the nuclear industry as an ideal working fluid for reactor cooling, energy transfer, fueling and fission product absorption.
Recent data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider show how three distinct variations of particles called upsilons “melt,” or dissociate, in the hot particle soup that existed in the very early universe. The results from the STAR experiment support the theory that this hot matter is a soup of “free” quarks and gluons. Measuring how different upsilons dissociate helps scientists learn about the quark-gluon plasma.
Bottomonium mesons consist of a heavy bottom quark bound to an antibottom quark, and the two quarks can be bound loosely, more tightly, and very tightly (creating the smallest bottomonium meson). New calculations that predict the temperature at which these mesons will melt show that the smallest bottomonium particles can stay intact at very high temperatures. This may explain why collisions at different particle accelerators produce different numbers of bottomonium particles.
Theorists have calculated how quickly a melted soup of quarks and gluons—the building blocks of protons and neutrons—transfers its momentum to heavy quarks. The calculation will help explain experimental results showing heavy quarks getting caught up in the flow of matter generated in heavy ion collisions.
Nuclei such as Indium-115 (In-115) are extremely long lived, with half-lives of more than 100 billion years. These nuclei allow scientists to probe elusive high energy nuclear states. In a new study, scientists theoretically determined the electron energy spectrum from decays of In-115 based on data collected in a specialized detector. The scientists also performed the world’s most precise measurement of the half-life of In-115.
Studying radioactive materials is very difficult due to the potential health risks, the cost, and the difficulty of producing some radioisotopes. Scientists recently developed a new approach to harvest detailed chemical information on radioactive and/or enriched stable isotopes. The new approach is much more efficient, requiring 1,000 times less material than previous state-of-the-art methods, with no loss of data quality.
systematically varying the amount of energy involved in collisions of gold nuclei, scientists have shown that the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) exists in collisions at energies from 200 billion electron volts (GeV) at least to 19.6 GeV. However, its production appears to be “turned off” at the lowest collision energy, 3 GeV. The “off” signal shows up as a sign change in data that describe the distribution of protons produced in these collisions. The findings will help physicists further study the QGP and phases of nuclear matter.
Understanding the behavior of nuclear matter is extremely complicated, especially when working in three dimensions. Mathematical techniques from condensed matter physics that consider interactions in just one spatial dimension (plus time) greatly simplify the problem. Using this two-dimensional approach, scientists solved the complex equations that describe how low-energy excitations ripple through a system of dense nuclear matter such as exists at the center of neutron stars.
Theoretical calculations involving the strong force are complex in part because of the large number of ways these calculations can be performed. These options include “gauge choices.” All gauge choices should produce the same result for the calculation of any quantity that can be measured in an experiment. However, it is difficult to obtain consistent results when using one particular choice, “axial gauge.” New research resolves this puzzle.
Outside atomic nuclei, neutrons are unstable, disintegrating in about fifteen minutes due to the weak nuclear force to leave behind a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. New research identified a shift in the strength with which a spinning neutron experiences the weak nuclear force, due to emission and absorption of photons and pions. The finding impacts high precision searches of new, beyond the Standard Model interactions in beta decay.
Physicists analyzing data from gold ion smashups at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, are searching for evidence that nails down a so-called critical point in the way nuclear matter changes from one phase to another.
Laszlo Horvath, an early career physicist at PPPL, is the winner of the 2022 Károly Simonyi Memorial Plaque from the Hungarian Nuclear Society.
Decades-long commitment to advancing peaceful nuclear energy and national security is lauded by U.S. Department of Energy.
Scientists from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and their collaborators in the RHIC-STAR experiment have observed the collective flow of hypernuclei in heavy-ion collisions for the first time.
Theorists calculated how the key ingredients of a phenomenon called the chiral magnetic effect should evolve over time in an expanding quark-gluon plasma. The theorists used the holographic principle to model the magnetic fields and other relevant characteristics needed for the effect. The results will help scientists interpret collision data and plan new searches for the chiral magnetic effect and the underlying quantum anomaly.
Physicists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have published the first observation of directed flow of hypernuclei -- short-lived, rare nuclei that contain at least one hyperon. The results may give insight into hyperon-nucleon interactions and the structure of neutron stars.
A radiation safety center started by Alvin Weinberg is still going strong -- 60 years later.
Nuclear clocks could allow scientists to probe the fundamental forces of the universe in the future. LMU researchers have made a crucial advance in this area as part of an international collaboration.
Shreyas Balachandran has been chosen to receive the ICMC Cryogenic Materials Award for Excellence, presented annually to an individual under 40 who has demonstrated innovation, impact and international recognition for their work in advancing the knowledge of cryogenic materials.
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.
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