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Category: particle physics – Page 369

For a few brief moments, the high-powered lasers generated 1.3 megajoules of fusion energy.

A breakthrough experiment last month at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California has turned up a whopping 1.3 megajoules of energy, or about three percent of the energy contained in one kilogram of crude oil. The work, as outlined in the journal Physical Review E, puts physicists “at the threshold of fusion ignition,” according to the lab’s press release.

Nuclear fusion, in the simplest terms, is a reaction in which atoms are smashed together to generate an abundance of energy. In some ways, it’s less dangerous than nuclear fission —a process that involves splitting heavy, unstable atoms into two lighter ones—and has the potential to create a lot more energy.

All of today’s functional nuclear power plants currently use nuclear fission, and scientists have long been on the hunt for a way to make nuclear fusion a reality; consider it a kind of holy grail of clean energy.

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The uncertainty principle, first introduced by Werner Heisenberg in the late 1920’s, is a fundamental concept of quantum mechanics. In the quantum world, particles like the electrons that power all electrical product can also behave like waves. As a result, particles cannot have a well-defined position and momentum simultaneously. For instance, measuring the momentum of a particle leads to a disturbance of position, and therefore the position cannot be precisely defined.

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Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, our Universe was born in a massive explosion that gave rise to the first subatomic particles and the laws of physics as we know them.

About 370,000 years later, hydrogen had formed, the building block of stars, which fuse hydrogen and helium in their interiors to create all the heavier elements. While hydrogen remains the most pervasive element in the Universe, it can be difficult to detect individual clouds of hydrogen gas in the interstellar medium (ISM).

This makes it difficult to research the early phases of star formation, which would offer clues about the evolution of galaxies and the cosmos.

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Invisibility devices may soon no longer be the stuff of science fiction. A new study published in the De Gruyter journal Nanophotonics by lead authors Huanyang Chen at Xiamen University, China, and Qiaoliang Bao, suggests the use of the material Molybdenum Trioxide (a-MoO3) to replace expensive and difficult to produce metamaterials in the emerging technology of novel optical devices.

The idea of an invisibility cloak may sound more like magic than science, but researchers are currently hard at work producing devices that can scatter and bend light in such a way that it creates the effect of invisibility.

Thus far these devices have relied on metamaterials – a material that has been specially engineered to possess novel properties not found in naturally occurring substances or in the individual particles of that material – but the study by Chen and co-authors suggests the use of a-MoO3 to create these invisibility devices.

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Researchers in the Technion Department of Materials Science and Engineering have succeeded in changing a material’s electrical properties by vacating an oxygen atom from the original structure. Possible applications include electronic-device miniaturization and radiation detection.

What do ultrasound imaging of a fetus, cellular mobile communication, micro motors, and low-energy-consumption computer memories have in common? All of these technologies are based on ferroelectric materials, which are characterized by a strong correlation between their atomic and the electrical and mechanical properties.

Technion–Israel Institute of Technology researchers have succeeded in changing the properties of ferroelectric materials by vacating a single from the original structure. The breakthrough could pave the way for the development of new technologies. The research was headed by Assistant Professor Yachin Ivry of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, accompanied by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Hemaprabha Elangovan and Ph.D. student Maya Barzilay, and was published in ACS Nano. It is noted that engineering an individual oxygen vacancy poses a considerable challenge due to the light weight of oxygen .

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If the finding really is the result of new fundamental particles then it will finally be the breakthrough that physicists have been yearning for for decades.

When CERN’s gargantuan accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), fired up ten years ago, hopes abounded that new particles would soon be discovered that could help us unravel physics’ deepest mysteries. Dark matter, microscopic black holes, and hidden dimensions were just some of the possibilities. But aside from the spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson, the project has failed to yield any clues as to what might lie beyond the standard model of particle physics, our current best theory of the micro-cosmos.

So our new paper from LHCb, one of the four giant LHC experiments, is likely to set physicists’ hearts beating just a little faster. After analyzing trillions of collisions produced over the last decade, we may be seeing evidence of something altogether new – potentially the carrier of a brand new force of nature.

But the excitement is tempered by extreme caution. The standard model has withstood every experimental test thrown at it since it was assembled in the 1970s, so to claim that we’re finally seeing something it can’t explain requires extraordinary evidence.

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The previously elusive methanediol molecule of importance to the organic, atmospheric science and astrochemistry communities has been synthetically produced for the first time by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers. Their discovery and methods were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on December 30.

Methanediol is also known as formaldehyde monohydrate or methylene glycol. With the chemical formula CH2(OH)2, it is the simplest geminal diol, a molecule which carries two hydroxyl groups (OH) at a single carbon atom. These are suggested as key intermediates in the formation of aerosols and reactions in the ozone layer of the atmosphere.

The research team—consisting of Department of Chemistry Professor Ralf Kaiser, postdoctoral researchers Cheng Zhu, N. Fabian Kleimeier and Santosh Singh, and W.M. Keck Laboratory in Astrochemistry Assistant Director Andrew Turner—prepared methanediol via energetic processing of extremely low temperature ices and observed the molecule through a high-tech mass spectrometry tool exploiting tunable vacuum photoionization (the process in which an ion is formed from the interaction of a photon with an atom or molecule) in the W.M. Keck Laboratory in Astrochemistry. Electronic structure calculations by University of Mississippi Associate Professor Ryan Fortenberry confirmed the gas phase stability of this molecule and demonstrated a pathway via reaction of electronically excited oxygen atoms with methanol.

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LCLS-II will be able to produce images of atoms a million times a second.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are putting the finishing touches on what will become the world’s brightest laser. Called the Linac Coherent Light Source II (LCLS-II), it will be 10,000 times brighter than the brightest laser before itself, once it becomes operational.

Currently, under construction about 30 feet (9 meters) underground close to Stanford University, the laser promises to help physicists unlock some of the fundamental unknowns about our universe. The laser apparatus extends for about 2 miles (3.2 km) in a specially excavated tunnel.

Its predecessor, Linac Coherent Light Source I (LCLS-I) went live in 2009 and is able to create a beam capable of 120 light pulses a second. LCLS-II, however, crushes this record by being able to produce 1 million pulses per second.

“I think it’s absolutely fair to say that the LCLS-II will usher in a new era of science,” Dr. James Cryan, a staff scientist at SLAC told CNET in an exclusive tour of the new facility.

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