Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2010

Most massive antimatter nucleus yet identified in particle experiments.

Circa 2017

Antimatter sounds mysterious and powerful. In science fiction, it often has properties like defying gravity or taking on opposite colors. But in reality, antimatter is really no different than regular matter, except that antimatter atoms have positrons instead of electrons and antiprotons instead of protons. At CERN in Switzerland, scientists have actually been able to create antimatter and store it in a magnetic field that keeps it from touching regular matter. If that happens, the antimatter annihilates, producing a burst of energy. In sci-fi like Star Trek, this energy is used to power spaceships. We’re still very far from something like that, but it’s still pretty incredible that we can create something that was for a long time just a hypothesis.

Solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy—a technique that measures the frequencies emitted by the nuclei of some atoms exposed to radio waves in a strong magnetic field—can be used to determine chemical and 3D structures as well as the dynamics of molecules and materials.

A necessary initial step in the analysis is the so-called chemical shift assignment. This involves assigning each peak in the NMR spectrum to a given atom in the molecule or material under investigation. This can be a particularly complicated task. Assigning chemical shifts experimentally can be challenging and generally requires time-consuming multi-dimensional correlation experiments. Assignment by comparison to statistical analysis of experimental chemical shift databases would be an alternative solution, but there is no such database for molecular solids.

A team of researchers including EPFL professors Lyndon Emsley, head of the Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, Michele Ceriotti, head of the Laboratory of Computational Science and Modeling and Ph.D. student Manuel Cordova decided to tackle this problem by developing a method of assigning NMR spectra of organic crystals probabilistically, directly from their 2D chemical structures.

Scientists have been able to trap antimatter particles using a combination of electric and magnetic fields. Antiprotons have been stored for over a year, while antimatter electrons have been stored for shorter periods of time, due to their lower mass. In 2011, researchers at CERN announced that they had stored antihydrogen for over 1,000 seconds.

While scientists have been able to store and manipulate small quantities of antimatter, they have not been able to answer why antimatter is so rare in the universe. According to Einstein’s famous equation E = mc², energy should convert into matter and antimatter in equal quantities. And, immediately after the Big Bang, there was a lot of energy. Accordingly, we should see as much antimatter as matter in our universe, and yet we don’t. This is a pressing unsolved mystery of modern physics.

Continue reading “Scientists Make Big Step Towards Making Antimatter Stand Still” »

It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials.

Carnegie’s Yingwei Fei and Lin Wang were part of an international research team that synthesized a new ultrahard form of carbon glass with a wealth of potential practical applications for devices and electronics. It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials. Their findings are published in Nature.

Function follows form when it comes to understanding the properties of a material. How its atoms are chemically bonded to each other, and their resulting structural arrangement, determines a material’s physical qualities—both those that are observable by the naked eye and those that are only revealed by scientific probing.

Early-career nuclear physicists show that a better understanding of how neutrinos interact with matter is needed to make the most of upcoming experiments.

Neutrinos may be the key to finally solving a mystery of the origins of our matter-dominated universe, and preparations for two major, billion-dollar experiments are underway to reveal the particles’ secrets. Now, a team of nuclear physicists have turned to the humble electron to provide insight for how these experiments can better prepare to capture critical information. Their research, which was carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and recently published in Nature, reveals that major updates to neutrino models are needed for the experiments to achieve high-precision results.

Neutrinos are ubiquitous, generated in copious numbers by stars throughout our universe. Though prevalent, these shy particles rarely interact with matter, making them very difficult to study.

How to Catch a Perfect Wave: Scientists Take a Closer Look Inside the Perfect Fluid

Berkeley Lab research brings us closer to understanding how our universe began.

Scientists have reported new clues to solving a cosmic conundrum: How the quark-gluon plasma.

Continue reading “Solving a Cosmic Conundrum: ‘Perfect Fluid’ Brings Us Closer to Understanding How Our Universe Began” »

Friends Lunch with a Member.

Topic: Negative Energy, Quantum Information and Causality.
Speaker: Adam Levine.
Date: November 19, 2021

Continue reading “Negative Energy, Quantum Information and Causality — Adam Levine” »

Physicists have detected “ghost particles” in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time. An experiment called FASER picked up telltale signals of neutrinos being produced in particle collisions, which can help scientists better understand key physics.

Neutrinos are elementary particles that are electrically neutral, extremely light and rarely interact with particles of matter. That makes them tricky to detect, even though they’re very common – in fact, there are billions of neutrinos streaming through your body right now. Because of this, they’re often described as ghost particles.

Neutrinos are produced in stars, supernovae, quasars. radioactive decay and from cosmic rays interacting with atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s long been thought that particle accelerators like the LHC should be making them too, but without the right instruments they would just zip away undetected.