Feature Channels: Particle Physics

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Freshly harvested data from NASA’s Cassini mission reveals that the ringed planet’s moons may be younger than previously thought.

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Resembling the Leidenfrost effect seen in rapidly boiling water droplets, a disk of ice becomes highly mobile due to a levitating layer of water between it and the smooth surface on which it rests and melts. The otherwise random rotation and translation (sliding) of the ice block can be directed by controlling the flow dynamics of the melted ice-turned-water close to the disk surface.

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Water is vital to life on Earth, yet from a scientific point of view, much remains unknown about water and its many solid phases, which display a plethora of unusual properties and so-called anomalies that, while central to water’s chemical and biological importance, are often viewed as controversial. This inspired researchers to pursue a better understanding of water and ice as materials, which has a far-reaching impact on many areas of research.

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University of Notre Dame astronomers have identified what they believe to be the second generation of stars, shedding light on the nature of the universe’s first stars.

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Little is rarer than an observable quantum spin liquid, but now, tests reveal that a synthetic crystal with ytterbium as its base may house one at near absolute zero. It joins an extremely short list of materials believed house myriads of particles joined together in an observable vast, shared entanglement, or "spooky action at a distance."

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Asimina Arvanitaki will share the New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Foundation – a $100,000 award that recognizes exceptionally promising young researchers.

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Researchers at Argonne have recently developed a new ultra-low-friction sliding contact mechanism that uses chilled water to remove heat from a key component of a next-generation collider.

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Studying historical, astronomical and biblical records, Grant Mathews, University of Notre Dame professor, believes the event that led the Magi was an extremely rare planetary alignment occurring in 6 B.C., and the likes of which may never be seen again.

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Majorana fermions are particles that could potentially be used as information units for a quantum computer. An experiment by physicists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the University of Basel’s Department of Physics has confirmed their theory that Majorana fermions can be generated and measured on a superconductor at the end of wires made from single iron atoms. The researchers also succeeded in observing the wave properties of Majoranas and, therefore, in making the interior of a Majorana visible for the first time. The results were published in the Nature journal npj Quantum Information.

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A team of researchers from India have created a model to explain how liquid diffuses through paper which has applications in medical testing and perfume manufacturing

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UPTON, NY—Many people picture electrical conductivity as the flow of charged particles (mainly electrons) without really thinking about the atomic structure of the material through which those charges are moving. But scientists who study "strongly correlated electron" materials such as high-temperature superconductors and those with strong responses to magnetism know that picture is far too simplistic.

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Elena Long, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of New Hampshire, has been awarded the 2016 Jefferson Science Associates Postdoctoral Research Prize for plans to build and test a new kind of target that will allow scientists to explore the physics of spinning nuclei at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

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A group of researchers have observed the transit of a potentially Earth-like extrasolar planet as it passes in front of its parent star.

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A research team led by the University of Minnesota uses new models and evidence from meteorites to show that a low-mass supernova triggered the formation of our solar system.

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Article describes physics behind fast magnetic reconnection.

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Breastfeeding is a topic that creates discussion and at times even controversy. However, some basic questions about its biology still remain. For instance, does successful infant feeding depend on the mechanics of the breast and, conversely, does breast health depend on breastfeeding? It has been virtually impossible to study these complex dynamics and the delicate interplay that makes breastfeeding possible, but a pair of researchers are working together to build a biomimetic breast that will allow scientists to study how the breast behaves during its primary function: infant feeding.

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A team at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, exploring how air bubbles rise within a complex fluid, like those found while processing wet concrete, wondered if they could actually get them to sink instead by shaking the mixture in the right way. During the 69th DFD meeting, the researchers will present their work studying bubbles within complex fluids.

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Fluid dynamics met history for a team of researchers who studied the Boston Molasses Flood, a disaster that claimed 21 lives, injured 150 and flattened buildings in the Commercial Street area of Boston in 1919. During the 69th APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting, a trio of fluid dynamics physicists at Harvard University will explain how they were inspired to study this event by a group of undergraduates who produced a parody rap video about the flood for a project in their fluid dynamics course. The trio examined this historic, yet not well known, event from a scientific perspective.

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The 69th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society – Division of Fluid Dynamics this month will cover fluid dynamics advances across many disciplines, with applications including forensics, biomimetic devices, sports dynamics, bubble formation and more

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Researchers have been attempting to measure dark matter for more than three decades, but have yet to detect a dark matter particle. Through experiments both deep underground like LUX and LUX-ZEPLIN and in space like the AMS, researchers are narrowing the field of search.

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Powerful supercomputer simulations of high-energy collisions between atomic cores provide new insights about the complex structure of a superhot fluid called the quark-gluon plasma.

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A research team from Shizuoka University in Japan has explored the permeability of skin and will present their work during the AVS 63rd International Symposium and Exhibition being held November 6-11, 2016, in Nashville, Tennessee. As a means to interact with skin, the team used plasma, a state of matter where electrons have dissociated from their corresponding ions and exhibit more collective behavior. Using plasma, which conducts electricity, they successfully decreased its barrier function for transdermal drug delivery.

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"How do massive stars form?" is one of the fundamental questions in modern astrophysics, because these massive stars govern the energy budget of their host galaxies. Using numerical simulations, researchers at the University of Tübingen in a collaboration with Eduard Vorobyov from the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Vienna revealed new components of the formation of massive stars, which were already known from the formation process of low-mass as well as primordial stars. The study has now been published in the peer-review journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Astronomers using ALMA have discovered a tsunami of stars and gas that is crashing midway through the disk of a spiral galaxy known as IC 2163. This colossal wave of material – which was triggered when IC 2163 recently sideswiped another spiral galaxy dubbed NGC 2207 – produced dazzling arcs of intense star formation that resemble a pair of eyelids.

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Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are playing key roles in two recently funded computing projects with the goal of developing cutting-edge scientific applications for future exascale supercomputers that can perform at least a billion billion computing operations per second – 50 to 100 times more than the most powerful supercomputers in the world today.

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During the AVS 63rd International Symposium and Exhibition being held November 6-11, 2016, in Nashville, Tennessee, Zachary Voras, a surface chemist at the University of Delaware in Newark, and his colleagues will explain how they study the complex dynamics behind the aging of Renaissance-era artwork.

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Article roundups several PPPL news releases from the 58th annual APS Division of Plasma Physics conference.

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Physicist Egemen Kolemen is sharing a grant from ExxonMobil to research whether plasma could reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with oil wells.

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NASA has awarded Cal State LA two grants to conduct materials science experiments with the International Space Station. The grants are made through NASA’s Physical Sciences Research program and will provide a total of $840,000 in funding.

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An international team of physicists has developed a pioneering approach to using Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs)—the highest energy particles in nature since the Big Bang—to study particle interactions far beyond the reach of human-made accelerators.

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Researchers have created a 3D printed cosmic microwave background - a map of the oldest light in the universe - and provided the files for download.

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UPTON, NY — Sally Dawson, a theoretical physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been named a recipient of the 2017 J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics. The award, given by the American Physical Society (APS), recognizes Dawson and her three co-authors of The Higgs Hunter's Guide, a seminal book first published in 1989 on the physics of Higgs bosons—fundamental particles predicted by the accepted theory of particle physics as essential to generating the mass of fundamental particles, and discovered in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012.

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For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system. Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but new observations with ALMA and the VLA revealed the process in action.

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A rare triple-star system surrounded by a disk with a spiral structure has been discovered by a University of Oklahoma-led research team.

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A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has won the 2016 Edison Patent Award for inventing an on-demand method to create a badly needed isotope used routinely in medical imaging devices to diagnose diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

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Engineering professors Paul Steen and Michel Louge have both received funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA's CASIS program to send experiments to the International Space Station.

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AIP Publishing has announced that Gregory Howes, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Iowa, is the winner of the inaugural 2016 Ronald C. Davidson Award for Plasma Physics. The award will be presented annually in collaboration with the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics, recognizing outstanding plasma physics research by a Physics of Plasmas author.

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ASML, a leading provider of computer chip manufacturing equipment, is tapping Lawrence Livermore expertise in supercomputing and laser plasma physics to improve the performance of the light source for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which is used to make microchips for the semiconductor industry.

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Close cooperation among the NASA and university scientists working in Cramer Hall at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) creates a unique intellectual alloy from the everyday blending of NASA personnel, UAH faculty and staff, and the university’s students.

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Hydrogen. Atomic number 1. It is the simplest and lightest element on the periodic table, but don’t be fooled by its humble appearance. With just a single proton and a single electron, it is the most abundant element in the universe and has fueled star formation for the past 13 billion years. Now scientists – including an astrophysicist from West Virginia University – have mapped the key ingredient’s distribution across the Milky Way, revealing details about our galaxy that have never been seen before.

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Astronauts frequently encounter huge droplets in space, and Scott Kelly recently demonstrated their unusual behavior aboard the International Space Station (ISS) via water balls and a hydrophobic (water repellant) ping pong paddle. To explore the dynamics of these gigantic droplets, a group of researchers led by Mark Weislogel, a professor within the Department of Mechanical & Materials Engineering at Portland State University in Oregon, is generating and studying them right here on Earth.

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A new planetarium show is designed to immerse audiences in the search for dark matter, which we have so far detected only through its gravitational effects though it makes up most of the mass of the universe.

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Thanks to advances in high-speed cameras, imaging techniques and computer modeling, Sandia National Laboratories researchers are studying fragmenting explosives in ways that weren’t possible before.

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James Clerk Maxwell conducted some of the first documented studies of free-falling objects during the mid-1800s, when the physicist analyzed the tumbling motion of a freely falling plate. But much remains unknown about the phenomena. Maxwell's work inspired a team of researchers in China to conduct a numerical study to explore the patterns made by 2-D rectangular plates falling freely within water. They report their findings this week in Physics of Fluids.

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Terrence Malick's science documentary "Voyage of Time" features two scenes contributed by visualization expert Ralf Kaehler and astrophysicist Tom Abel from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

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The Milky Way Project is a crowd-sourced research effort that allows citizen scientists to identity nebulae, stars and more in imagery taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected near a dying star. The host star, called V Hydrae, is a bloated red giant, residing 1,200 light-years away, which has probably shed at least half of its mass into space during its death throes. But, astronomers believe the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star orbiting the red giant. This stellar "cannon fire" has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years.

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A new data analysis/visualization toolkit developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is designed to help speed particle accelerator research and design by enabling in situ visualization and analysis of accelerator simulations at scale.

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Findings by UCLA-led team hold promise for new ways to protect telecommunication and navigation satellites.

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Researchers in Japan have used a new Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulator to understand how magnetic reconnection works for the tenuous plasma surrounding our Earth and have identified new classes of electron orbits that help scientists understand the characteristics of the fast jets of electrons that stream from the reconnection region. The researchers explain their results this week in Physics of Plasmas.