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Mar 8 | News
Today, at the world’s largest supercollider, all of the control rooms will be staffed by women. A brainstorm of Indiana Univ.'s Pauline Gagnon, the event is part of a larger observation of International Women’s Day and a celebration of the accomplishments of women in the highly technical field of high-energy physics.
Mar 8 | News
Carbon nanotubes with a special coating of reactive fuel can, when ignited, create a thermal wave that not only spreads quickly but also pushes electrons along the tube, creating a substantial electric current. The energy created by MIT engineers far exceeds that predicted by thermoelectric calculations.
Feb 16 | News
Possible “melting” symmetry at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, first reported by Brookhaven Lab scientists in a paper published this week, has fulfilled previously untested predictions about the behavior of quarks and gluons that normally maintain “mirror” symmetry. The collider was built to recreate the extreme conditions that existed at the birth of our universe.
Feb 9 | News
Enrico Fermi’s fanciful vision of a particle accelerator that encircled the globe is probably impractical. This is why researchers at the Univ. of Chicago and Fermilab are instead looking for ways to pack more energy into each particle meter of acceleration. Niobium, one of the best superconducting elements out there, might help us up the ante.
Feb 5 | News
In December, the Large Hadron Collider shattered the world record for highest energy particle collisions. This week, team led by researchers from MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, completed work on the first scientific paper analyzing the results of those collisions.
Feb 1 | News
Relying on technologies that have won several R&D 100 Awards, Lawrence Livermore Lab’s National Ignition Facility to see if 192 laser beams designed to focus on a single point last fall could be operated without energy-sapping beam scattering. This shows NIF can achieve highly symmetrical target compression necessary for ignition tests later this year.
Jan 11 | News
Consisting of hundreds of thousands of plastic tubes filled with mineral water, the NOvA detector—positioned near Fermilab—will begin life as 220-ton detector that will form the basis for a later 14,000-ton detector that may be the first device that will capture the elusive oscillations of the fundamental subatomic neutrino particle.
12/30/2009 | News
From their humble beginnings as offshoots of the ordinary
electric light bulb, particle accelerators have evolved in surprising
directions. Among the most productive and promising developments have been
light sources, and Berkeley Lab has recently traced their history, from
electron storage rings to free electron lasers.
12/17/2009 | News
Invented by researchers at Caltech, 4D electron microscopy is the practice by which single electrons introduce the dimension of time into electron microscopy. When used in conjunction with femtosecond laser pulses to image small-scale variations at the atomic level, researchers says, it can eliminate the “motion blur” associated with normal electron diffraction techniques.
12/16/2009 | News
Capacitor-type power factor correction devices are heavily advertised on the Internet as way to save money on home electricity bills. But physicists at NIST have taken a close look at the claim that they reduce the amount of current drawn from power lines while simultaneously providing necessary current to appliances and found that there is a benefit. But it’s not cost savings.