Lasers normally use mirrors to create laser light, but a new kind uses clumps of moving particles. The result is a laser that is more programmable and could generate extra-sharp visual displays.
TRISO particles cannot melt in a reactor and can withstand extreme temperatures well beyond the threshold of current nuclear fuels.
There’s a lot of buzz around advanced nuclear.
These technologies are going to completely change the way we think about nuclear reactors.
Continue reading “TRISO Particles: The Most Robust Nuclear Fuel on Earth” »
After the Higgs, the Large Hadron Collider was expected to find other theorised particles. It didn’t, but particle physicists are optimistic about a new era of experiment-led exploration.
AbstractAlpha particles with energies on the order of megaelectronvolts will be the main source of plasma heating in future magnetic confinement fusion react… See more.
Experiments at the Joint European Torus tokamak show improved thermal ion confinement in the presence of highly energetic ions and Alfvénic instabilities in the plasma.
An investigation into a neutron-rich isotope of indium using a cutting-edge nuclear physics technique has begun to unravel the mysteries of how single particles behave inside the nucleus.
We have known that a nucleus is comprised of protons, which give an element its atomic number, and neutrons since the early 1930s. But how an individual proton or neutron behaves inside the heart of an atom is still poorly understood. Now, an international collaboration including scientists from Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and US has taken a step closer to understanding these complex interactions.
Nuclear physics researchers often look at elements with so-called ‘magic numbers’ of protons or neutrons, which are exceptionally well bound and thus highly stable. However, to learn about nuclear structure, nuclides with one fewer proton are used, known as a single proton hole. By investigating the electronic transitions, researchers can study the atomic, hyperfine structure of individual particles due to the interactions between electrons and the nucleus. This gives clues as to the nucleus’ magnetic and electric characteristics, which can then give a complete picture of how all protons and neutrons are distributed and interact inside a nucleus.
Continue reading “New technique reveals interactions inside indium nucleus” »
How did the Arava, a punishingly hot and arid desert, become one of Israel’s breadbaskets? It’s a story of determination and thinking outside the box.
The discovery could inform the design of practical superconducting devices. When it comes to graphene, it appears that superconductivity runs in the family. Graphene is a single-atom-thin 2D material that can be produced by exfoliation from the same graphite that is found in pencil lead. The u.
The discovery could inform the design of practical superconducting devices.
When it comes to graphene.
Graphene is an allotrope of carbon in the form of a single layer of atoms in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice in which one atom forms each vertex. It is the basic structural element of other allotropes of carbon, including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes, and fullerenes. In proportion to its thickness, it is about 100 times stronger than the strongest steel.
Continue reading “MIT Physicists Discover a Family of ‘Magic’ Superconducting Graphene Structures” »
The sterile neutrino, if it truly exists, only answers to gravity.
Physicists are spelunking the complex findings from an experimental particle reactor found a mile below the surface in the mountains of Russia. What they found has the potential to send an earthquake through the bedrock of the standard model of physics itself: the results could confirm a new elementary particle, called a “sterile neutrino,” or demonstrate a need to revise a portion of the standard model.
The research comes from New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in collaboration with the Baksan Neutrino Observatory near the Georgia border in far southwestern Russia. The scientists outlined their findings in two new papers published last month in the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review C.
Continue reading “Physicists May Have Stumbled Upon an Entirely New Elementary Particle” »
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When talking about quantum physics, people will often nonchalantly say that particles can be in two places at once. Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explores what is actually going on.
Continue reading “Can particles really be in two places at the same time?” »
Ten years ago this week, two international collaborations of groups of scientists, including a large contingent from Caltech, confirmed that they had found conclusive evidence for the Higgs boson, an elusive elementary particle, first predicted in a series of articles published in the mid-1960s, that is thought to endow elementary particles with mass.
Fifty years prior, as theoretical physicists endeavored to understand the so-called electroweak theory, which describes both electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force (involved in radioactive decay), it became apparent to Peter Higgs, working in the UK, and independently to François Englert and Robert Brout, in Belgium, as well as U.S. physicist Gerald Guralnik and others, that a previously unidentified field that filled the universe was required to explain the behavior of the elementary particles that compose matter. This field, the Higgs field, would lead to a particle with zero spin, significant mass, and have the ability to spontaneously break the symmetry of the earliest universe, allowing the universe to materialize. That particle became known as the Higgs boson.
