Physicist Steven Sabbagh Leads Study to Predict and Avoid Disruptions on KSTAR Plasmas
Princeton Plasma Physics LaboratoryArticle describes multinational contract to study prediction and avoidance of disruptions on South Korea's KSTAR tokamak
Article describes multinational contract to study prediction and avoidance of disruptions on South Korea's KSTAR tokamak
Swirling around the young star Elias 2-27 is a stunning spiral-shape pinwheel of dust.
Physics can often seem inconceivable. It’s a field of strange concepts and special terms. And to make things even more complicated, physics has repurposed a number of familiar English words. Not to worry! Here is a handy list of words that acquire a new meaning when spoken by physicists.
The universe is expanding uniformly according to research led by UCL which reports that space isn’t stretching in a preferred direction or spinning.
Besides providing substantive information about the atmospheres of other planets, cosmic dust particles can impact radio communications, climate and even serve as fertilizer for phytoplankton in the oceans. A team of researchers has developed a new experimental Meteoric Ablation Simulator (MASI) that can help answer questions about cosmic dust and how it impacts Earth and everything on it.
LUX-ZEPLIN, an ultrasensitive dark matter detector, has cleared a major approval milestone and is on track to begin its mile-deep hunt for theoretical particles known as WIMPs in 2020.
Researchers in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering have measured the twisting force, or torque, generated by light on a silicon chip. Their work holds promise for applications such as miniaturized gyroscopes and torsional sensors to measure magnetic field, which can have significant industrial and consumer impact.
An international team of astronomers using ALMA has explored the same distant corner of the universe first revealed in the iconic image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and a trick of nature, have confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our galaxy. The Hubble observations represent the first time such a three-body system has been confirmed using the gravitational microlensing technique.
In a new study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, scientists noticed that magnetic skyrmions – small electrically uncharged circular structures with a spiraling magnetic pattern – do get deflected by an applied current, much like a curveball gets deflected by airflow.
Scientists have known for a long time that an atom or molecule can also be in two different states at once. Now researchers at the Stanford PULSE Institute and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have exploited this Schroedinger’s Cat behavior to create X-ray movies of atomic motion with much more detail than ever before.
An international team of researchers using ALMA and other telescopes has discovered the power source illuminating a so-called Lyman-alpha Blob – a rare, brightly glowing, and enormous concentration of gas in the distant universe.
New data from ALMA reveal that the black hole at the center of a galaxy named NGC 1068 is actually the source of its own dusty torus of dust and gas, forged from material flung out of the black hole’s accretion disk.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has approved nearly $10 million in funding to expand the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) – a multinational experiment to study how primordial galaxies forever changed the very early universe. This investment will increase the number of HERA antennas from 19 to 240 by the year 2018.
Clinking your glass of beer often leaves its contents sloshing back and forth. Soon, though, the motion stops, your drink settles, and you can sip without getting foam on your nose. The foam helps stop the sloshing, and now, physicists have figured out why. The analysis, published in Physics of Fluids, reveals a surprising effect on the surface of the water that contradicts conventional thought and deepens our understanding of the role of capillary forces.
With three new detectors coming online in the next several years, scientists are confident they will collect enough geoneutrino data to measure Earth's fuel level
When a NASA mission to the asteroid Bennu launches this month, Ithaca College Professor Beth Ellen Clark will be in charge of experiments that could reveal whether the roughly 500-meter-wide celestial body will collide with Earth in the next century.
Using colors to identify the approximate ages of more than 130,000 stars in the Milky Way’s halo, University of Notre Dame astronomers have produced the clearest picture yet of how the galaxy formed more than 13.5 billion years ago.
Over a hundred physicists from around the world came to the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for two weeks in August to attend the 44th SLAC Summer Institute (SSI) on “New Horizons on the Energy Frontier.”
The world's attention is now on Proxima Centauri b, a possibly Earth-like planet orbiting the closest star, 4.22 light-years away. The planet's orbit is just right to allow liquid water on its surface, needed for life. But could it in fact be habitable? If so, the planet evolved very different than Earth, say researchers at the University of Washington-based Virtual Planetary Laboratory where astronomers, geophysicists, climatologists, evolutionary biologists and others team to study how distant planets might host life.
Astrophysicists have proposed a clever new way of shedding light on the mystery of dark matter, believed to make up most of the universe. The irony is they want to try to pin down the nature of this unexplained phenomenon by using another, a cosmic emanation known as “fast radio bursts.”
TRIUMF is pleased to announce that Dr. Jens Dilling will become Associate Laboratory Director for its Physical Sciences Division (ALD-Physical Sciences), effective September 1, 2016.
Fermilab and J-PARC in Japan are the only major laboratories now hosting experiments with neutrino horns and Fermilab is one of the few places in the world that makes them.
According to the basic laws of thermodynamics, if you leave a warm apple pie in a winter window eventually the pie would cool down to the same temperature as the surrounding air.
New study suggests the comet broke up before reaching the Sun
Recent findings indicating the possible discovery of a previously unknown subatomic particle may be evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by theoretical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have discovered a new type of Weyl semimetal, a material that opens the way for further study of Weyl fermions, a type of massless elementary particle hypothesized by high-energy particle theory and potentially useful for creating high-speed electronic circuits and quantum computers.
Researchers working with more than six years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have used novel approaches to search for cosmic signals that could reveal what mysterious dark matter is made of. The scientists looked for hypothetical axion particles, studied the gamma-ray emissions from a large satellite galaxy of our Milky Way and analyzed the faint glow of gamma rays that covers the entire sky.
In a paper to appear in upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, the international team of astronomers reports that they were able to achieve four times better precision in measurements of how the universe’s visible matter is clustered together by studying the empty spaces in between.
A 3-D sky-mapping project that will measure the light of 35 million cosmic objects has received formal approval from the Department of Energy to move forward with construction. Installation of the project, called Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), is set to begin next year at the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, with observations starting up in January 2019.
Controlling bubbles is a difficult process and one that many of us experienced in a simplistic form as young children wielding a bubble wand, trying to create bigger bubbles without popping them. A research team in CINaM-CNRS Aix-Marseille Université in France has turned child’s play into serious business.
In December of last year, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced startling results hinting at the existence of an undiscovered subatomic particle — one with a mass six times heavier than the Higgs boson, the particle that made headlines in 2012.
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performance surpasses expectations; results confirm the Higgs particle, show "bump" appears to be a statistical fluctuation, and offer insight into quark-gluon plasma at high energies complementary to those explored at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).
In an effort to fill in the blanks of the Standard Model of particle physics, science has been conducting a diligent search for a hypothesized particle known as the “sterile neutrino.” Now, with the latest results from an icy particle detector at the South Pole, scientists are almost certain that there is no such particle.
New findings that reveal why the universe is dominated by matter and why we exist will be presented by the international T2K Collaboration, a team a researchers who will demonstrate why matter and antimatter are different.
New research suggests that it is possible to create a new form of light by binding light to a single electron, combining the properties of both.
Using information on the propagation and attenuation of fast particles coming from the collisions of high-energy nuclei, nuclear physicists can extract transport properties of the hot, dense matter.
One of the world’s hubs of computation in particle physics sits inconspicuously at the corner of 56th Street and Ellis Avenue on the University of Chicago campus.
High-energy physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, are hearing a bewitching siren song these days. They call it the 750 GeV bump: It could signal the existence of a new heavy particle—or it could be nothing.
All material things appear to be made of elementary particles that are held together by fundamental forces. But what are their exact properties? Questions with cosmic implications like these drive many of the scientific efforts at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Three distinguished particle physicists have joined the lab over the past months to pursue research on two particularly mysterious forms of matter: neutrinos and dark matter.
Magnetism permeates every scale of TRIUMF life, from the cyclotron’s 17m diameter main magnet down five orders of magnitude to the tiny internal magnetic fields inside millimetre-sized samples probed by μSR (muon spin rotation/resonance/relaxation) experiments, all the way down to probing materials at the tens of nanometre scale with the βNMR (beta-delayed nuclear magnetic resonance) facility.
Professors Chihiro Suzuki and Izumi Murakami's research group at the National Institute for Fusion Science, together with Professor Fumihiro Koike of Sophia University, injected various elements with high atomic numbers and produced highly charged ions(*1) in LHD plasmas. By measuring the emission spectrum of the extreme ultraviolet wavelength range, they discovered a new spectral line that had not been observed experimentally in the past. This result is not only significant for basic science research, it also is useful fundamental data for plasma application research such as the development of extreme ultraviolet lithography(*2) light sources. This research result was presented in an invited talk at the 43rd European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics, which was held from July 4, 2016, to July 8, 2016.
Article describes application of quantum mechanics and special relativity to plasma physics.
Alone on the cosmic road, far from any known celestial object, a young, independent star is going through a tremendous growth spurt. when a team led by Texas Tech University Department of Physics associate professor Tom Maccarone and postdoctoral researcher Chris Britt examined infrared images of the same area, they realized this object has a lot of warm dust around it, which must have been heated by an outburst. Researchers determined it likely is a young star that has been outbursting for several years.
Binary black holes recently discovered by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration could be primordial entities that formed just after the Big Bang, report Japanese astrophysicists.
Seeing fruit “turn bad and going to waste” inspired a team of researchers in China to explore using atmospheric pressure nonequilibrium plasma -- already widely used for medical purposes -- as a novel solution to extend the shelf life of fruit and other perishable foods. Now they report in Physics of Plasmas about their computational study of how air plasma interacts with bacterial biofilms on an apple’s surface suggests that plasma technology could be used to decontaminate food in the future.
In the second it takes to read these words, 65 billion neutrinos will shoot through every square centimeter of your body. Luckily, these infinitesimal particles don't do any harm -- they pass through us, as they do with most everything, without stopping or interacting.
New software is enabling ChemCam, the laser spectrometer on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, to select rock targets autonomously—the first time autonomous target selection is available for an instrument of this kind on any robotic planetary mission.
Dr Diego Altamirano from the University of Southampton has contributed to new research that has proved the existence of a ‘gravitational vortex’ around a black hole.