According to the traditional model of nuclear shells, oxygen-28 is expected to be a doubly magic nucleus with 20 neutrons and 8 protons. However, an experiment performed at the Rare Isotope Beam Facility in Japan measured the direct decay of oxygen-28 into four neutrons and oxygen-24 and found that it is not a bound nucleus.
As you gaze into the night sky, stars look like tiny, glowing pinpricks shining through the dark. But inside those stars, reactions occur that produce staggering amounts of energy. All stars – including our sun – produce energy through a powerful reaction called fusion.
Entanglement entropy quantifies the amount of entanglement between two subsystems. In many systems, the entanglement entropies increase as the area that separates them from their environment increases.
With a delicate hand, Anna Karion slides a large, enclosed box back into its protective shelf. She’s standing on top of a hill that overlooks the Washington D.C. area. This box, a greenhouse gas (GHG) sensor, is connected to a tube that runs up a tall, metal tower that is constantly collecting air samples. Karion, a research scientist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is working to fine-tune GHG measuring instruments installed in a telecommunications tower.
Polyolefins are resistant to breaking down, making them hard to recycle. Scientists have now discovered a yeast, Yarrowia lipolytica, that uses hydrocarbons derived from polyolefin plastic wastes to produce substances that can be used to make biodegradable polyesters and polyurethanes.
Like protons and neutrons, Lambda particles consist of three quarks bound together by gluons. But unlike protons and neutrons, which contain a mixture of up and down quarks, Lambdas also contain a strange quark.
The tantalum isotope, Ta-180m, is found naturally in a long-lived excited state. However, the radioactive decay of this excited state in Ta-180m has never been observed.
When scientists collide heavy nuclei, the constituent quarks and gluons melt into a quark-gluon plasma.
Applications are currently being accepted for the Fall 2024 term of two undergraduate internship programs offered by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science: the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program and the Community College Internships (CCI) program.
The room buzzed with conversation, until the moderator attempted to quiet it for a second time. Slowly, discussions paused and heads turned back towards the front of the room.
At high temperatures and densities, plasmas in fusion devices can develop gradients that can grow into instabilities, including edge localized modes (ELMs) that can damage reactor walls. In this research, scientists studied negative triangularity, a way the plasma shape can deviate from an oval. The research found this shaping was inherently free of instabilities across various plasma conditions, including operating reactor conditions.
In cancer research, seeing is believing. Before they can diagnose or treat cancer, researchers and doctors need to have a clear understanding of what’s happening at a microscopic level. While existing technology allows us to see things the naked eye can’t, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is working to standardize a process for staining and seeing cancer in a whole new perspective – in 3D (three dimensions).
Theoretical models can fill the gaps in experimental physics, but using a single imperfect theoretical model can be misleading. To improve the quality of predictions, researchers created a machine learning method that combines the results of several imperfect models.
Conditions in peatlands slow microbial decomposition of organic matter into greenhouse gases. This process stores carbon in the soil. Researchers use the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE) experiment to warm air and soil in a northern Minnesota bog to simulate the effects of climate change on the carbon cycle. The experiments showed that all organic soil components can break down more quickly in warmer conditions.
Experimentalists and theorists have provided strong evidence for the creation of an exotic isotope, nitrogen-9, which has two neutrons and seven protons. This unbalanced ratio of protons to neutrons produces a nucleus that only survives for less than one-billionth of a nanosecond. The work also provides information on nitrogen-9’s mirror nucleus, helium-9, which has two protons to its seven neutrons.
High in the sky over an Alaskan tundra, a small aircraft ran the same pattern over and over again. It swooped through clouds and flew down close to the ground. But there were no people experiencing the flight from inside the plane – it was an unmanned aerial system (UAS). UASs are aircraft that people can operate remotely from the ground. Building on years of testing, researchers working with the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Department of Energy Office of Science user facility are now gaining access to these helpful tools.
Fluids moving through fractures in subsurface rock react with chemicals in the rock to alter the fractures and the rock’s permeability. The processes involved operate much more slowly in the field than in laboratory tests, making them hard to predict. This study used simulations of mineral dissolution to discover a link between the structure of fractures in rock and how that rock reacts with fluid moving through it.
The next generation of programmable quantum devices will require processors built around superior qubits. Researchers developed a blueprint for a novel quantum information processor based on fluxonium qubits. These fluxonium qubits outperform transmons, the most widely used superconducting qubits. The researchers also made practical suggestions on how to adapt and build the cutting-edge hardware for superconducting devices.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the schedule for upcoming events and submissions associated with the competition for the management and operating contract for the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF).
In response to the rapidly evolving landscape of data collection and analysis driven by advances in artificial intelligence, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) have established a Research Coordination Network (RCN) dedicated to advancing privacy research and the development, deployment and scaling of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs). Fulfilling a mandate from the "Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence," the initiative advances the recommendations in the National Strategy to Advance Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Analytics to move towards a data ecosystem where the beneficial power of data can be unlocked while protecting privacy.
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