Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $2.2 million for 11 collaborative research projects in high-energy physics that involve substantial collaboration with Japanese investigators.
Quantum systems decohere due to unwanted interactions with their environment. Correcting for the effects of decoherence is a major challenge for quantum information systems. Previous error correction methods have not kept up with decoherence.
Researchers investigated how large-scale urbanization and irrigation in the United States affect the three dominant types of summer precipitation in the mid-Atlantic region. They found that urbanization suppresses all three types of precipitation. Irrigation enhances non-convective and isolated deep convection precipitation, and its effects on mesoscale convective systems (MCS) depends on whether an MCS formed locally or remotely.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today released a plan to ensure the Department’s Federally funded research is more open and accessible to the public, researchers, and journalists as part of a broader effort by the Biden-Harris Administration to make government data more transparent.
Detecting drizzle in its early stages in marine stratocumulus clouds is important for studying how water in clouds becomes rainfall. However, detecting the initial stages of drizzle is challenging for ground-based remote-sensing observations.
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.
A new study investigated the role of the genes in individual switchgrass plants in determining the composition of the bacterial communities associated with the plants’ roots.
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.
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.
Creating efficient, self-sustaining fusion power requires good confinement of the heat in the plasma. This requires understanding particle and energy losses due to turbulence. A new analysis studied the complex interaction in turbulence between the slow, large-scale motion of hydrogen fuel ions and the fast, small-scale motion of electrons. It found that this so-called “multi-scale turbulence” is mostly responsible for the heat losses in the edge region of tokamak experiments.
When some semiconductors absorb light, the process can create excitons, quasi-particles made of an electron bound to an electron hole. Two-dimensional crystals of tungsten disulfide have unique but short-lived exciton states. Scientists developed a new approach called time-resolved momentum microscopy to create separate images of these individual quantum states. The study found that the coupling mechanisms that lead to mixing of the states may not fully match current theories.
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.
To study microbes, scientists need to collect, process, and share data in a standardized way. The National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC) Ambassador Program launched in 2021 to increase awareness and adoption of microbiome metadata standards. During the program’s year-long term in 2021 and 2022, more than 800 researchers attended 23 Ambassador-hosted presentations.
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.
Miscanthus thrives on marginal lands with limited fertilization and tolerates drought and cool temperatures, making it an ideal bioenergy candidate. Previous efforts to genetically improve miscanthus focused on introducing external genes at random places in the plant’s genomes. This research developed gene-editing procedures using CRISPR/Cas9 that will allow scientists to selectively target existing genes to knock out their function and introduce new genes into precise locations.
Kevin Wilson studies how chemistry proceeds at liquid interfaces on cloud droplets, atmospheric aerosols, and ocean surfaces. With the support of his 2012 Early Career award, his team focused on reactions between gases and surfaces of ozone and hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere.
Targeted alpha therapy using radioisotopes such as actinium-225 can destroy cancerous cells without harming healthy cells. However, making actinium-225 by bombarding radium targets with neutrons poses a challenge: how to chemically separate the radium from the actinium. A new approach uses radiation-resistant inorganic resin scaffolds as platforms for separating radium, actinium, and lead, improving production time, cost, and safety.
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.
Microbes drive key processes of life on Earth. Research constantly expands the database of microbial DNA sequences but does not provide full biological information about proteins. To engineer microbes, scientists need a fuller understanding of protein function. Scientists currently infer protein function by comparing it with reference databases, but this process is slow. To address this challenge, scientists developed Snekmer, a machine learning-based tool for modeling protein function.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $46 million in funding to eight companies advancing designs and research and development for fusion power plants, representing a major step in President Biden’s commitment to a pilot-scale demonstration of fusion within a decade. Fusion reactions power the stars, and research is underway to make fusion energy production on Earth possible, providing an abundant, inherently safe, non-carbon-emitting energy source for the planet. This funding from the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program will solidify U.S. leadership in fusion commercialization, a gamechanger that would help the United States meet the President’s goal of reaching a net-zero economy by 2050.
The astatine isotope astatine-211 (At-211) shows promise as a cancer therapy, but scientists know little about how it interacts with chemicals. Researchers have now discovered a new tunable bonding interaction between At-211 and a class of chemicals known as ketones. This discovery has the potential to improve cancer therapy drugs by linking At-211 to cancer targeting molecules.
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.
Future commercial fusion power plants will need to achieve temperatures of 100 million degrees C, which requires careful control of the plasma. Researchers have now achieved these temperatures on a compact spherical tokamak called ST40. The results are a step toward fusion pilot plants and the development of more compact, and potentially more economical, fusion power sources.
Paul Romatschke is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a fellow at the Center for Theory of Quantum Matter, also at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The National Virtual Climate Laboratory (NVCL), a comprehensive web portal for climate science projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program, is now available.
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.
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.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, at the celebration ceremony of the historic achievement of fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced a plan to provide up to $45 million to support Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) research and development.
The roles microbes play in ecosystems are changing with global warming. Microbes are also affected by infection by viruses, but scientists know relatively little about how these viral infections could change how microbes react to warming. In this study, scientists describe different ways that increasing temperatures could affect viruses and their microbial hosts. Their preliminary models show that viruses could alter carbon balance, causing some ecosystems to switch from net carbon sources to net carbon sinks.
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.
The air pollutant secondary organic aerosol (SOA) forms when ammonia and amines react with oxygenated species. When ammonia is present when alkenes react with ozone, SOA increases in size and numbers. This may be due to Criegee intermediates. New research found that a particular amine, dimethylamine, reacts 34,000 times faster with one version of the Criegee intermediate acetaldehyde oxide than with another version of the same compound.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science has selected 87 graduate students representing 33 states for the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program’s 2022 Solicitation 2 cycle. Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories, SCGSR prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission and secures our national position at the forefront of discovery and innovation.
Fusion energy researchers use a technique called Gas-Puff Imaging (GPI) to visualize an important phenomenon in tokamak devices involving turbulence in plasma magnetic confinement fields. This technique can generate roughly 1 million frames of visual data, far too much for humans to analyze by eye. Scientists recently tested a machine-learning based approach for analyzing GPI images. The system provides detailed, time- and space-resolved information and could aid in design and operation of future fusion power devices.
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.
The Biden-Harris Administration will be honoring Darleane C. Hoffman and Gabor A. Somorjai as recipients of the 2023 Enrico Fermi Presidential Award in a virtual ceremony June 6th, 2023, at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time. The Enrico Fermi Presidential Award is one of the oldest and most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed by the U.S. government.
Increasing temperature or nutrients in an ecosystem can destabilize food webs, but when temperature and nutrients increase together it can be difficult to predict the combined effects. This study examined a laboratory microbial food web consisting of bacterial prey and protist predators. It found that temperature and nutrients can alter the dynamics of microbial communities by changing how species’ abundances and average body sizes relate to each other.
Scientists created a nanoscale pattern of holes on a thin film of metal oxide known as titania to control the material’s electronic properties. The thin film noticeably improved the flow of electrons and inhibited the flow of ions in the material, increasing the material’s electrical conductivity. This will aid in next-generation microelectronics applications and quantum information processing.
Droughts, thunderstorms, heat waves, and warming oceans. Climate change is harming people, communities, and ecosystems right now. During 2022 alone, there were 18 different weather and climate disaster events that caused more than a billion dollars in damage each. Climate change isn’t a future problem. It is a today problem that will only get worse as long as we continue to produce large amounts of greenhouse gases.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science will sponsor the participation of 999 undergraduate students and 79 faculty members in three STEM-focused workforce development programs at 16 DOE national laboratories and a national fusion facility during summer 2023. Collectively, these programs ensure DOE and our nation have a strong, sustained workforce trained in the skills needed to address the energy, environment, and national security challenges of today and tomorrow.
Droughts, thunderstorms, heat waves, and warming oceans. Climate change is harming people, communities, and ecosystems right now. During 2022 alone, there were 18 different weather and climate disaster events that caused more than a billion dollars in damage each. Climate change isn’t a future problem. It is a today problem that will only get worse as long as we continue to produce large amounts of greenhouse gases.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science will sponsor the participation of 999 undergraduate students and 79 faculty members in three STEM-focused workforce development programs at 16 DOE national laboratories and a national fusion facility during summer 2023. Collectively, these programs ensure DOE and our nation have a strong, sustained workforce trained in the skills needed to address the energy, environment, and national security challenges of today and tomorrow.
Neutrinos are involved in a process named beta decay that involves a neutron converting into a proton emitting an electron and an antineutrino. There may also be an ultra-rare kind of beta decay that emits two electrons but no neutrinos, called neutrinoless-double beta decay (NLDBD). Researchers are using the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) to search for these rare NLDBD processes using different nuclei. Scientists have reported new tests using Tellurim-128 to look for NLDBD.
A novel system uses the discovery that the actinide berkelium, when oxidized, does not form negatively charged ions in solutions of high nitric acid, as other actinides do. This means an anion exchange column can separate berkelium by absorbing other actinides with negatively charged ions. The new method is much faster than the previously used approach, and is easier, cleaner, and yields purer product.
Protein-protein interactions are essential for life. Researchers used DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 to develop a deep learning approach for predicting and modeling multi-protein interactions. The AF2Complex approach generates much more accurate structural models than previous methods for modeling a protein complex. As a proof of concept, the researchers used AF2Complex to virtually screen key proteins in E. coli, discovering unexpected protein-protein interactions.
To understand quark-gluon plasma, theorists compare a sophisticated model to a large amount of experimental data. One of the parameters in this model is the size of the nucleons inside the two colliding lead nuclei. Low-energy experiments find a nucleon size of around 0.5 femtometers, while heavy ion experimental data have found a much larger nucleon size, of about 1 femtometers. A new analysis of heavy ion experimental data includes the experimentally measured reaction rate of lead-lead collisions to arrive at a nucleon size of 0.6 femtometers.
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