Feature Channels: Particle Physics

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The addition of sound waves offers the potential to better manipulate qubit communications within a quantum system, researchers say.

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Researchers from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) have, for the first time, converted the colour and bandwidth of ultrafast single photons using a room-temperature quantum memory in diamond.

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As part of a unique new X-ray laser project that will produce up to 1 million ultrabright X-ray pulses per second, Berkeley Lab researchers are managing the development of a new breed of electron "gun" and chains of powerful magnetic devices that cause electrons to emit ultrabright X-rays.

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Somewhat overlooked in the excitement that followed February's gravitational waves announcement is the fact that scientists don’t know the exact location the waves were coming from. University of Notre Dame astronomer Peter Garnavich is leading a group of researchers who are hoping to more precisely locate where future gravitational waves originate.

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Researchers propose a new way to improve the beam quality in laser wakefield accelerators, which are small and inexpensive enough to bring high energy physics experiments to a wide variety of universities and labs

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In December, the ATLAS and CMS experiments reported what could be the first hint of a new massive particle that spits out two photons as it decays. Now, physicists are presenting their latest analyses at the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, including a full investigation of this mysterious bump. After carefully checking, cross-checking and rechecking the data, both experiments have come to the same conclusion—the bump is still there.

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A few years ago, a global team of scientists parlayed decades of research into the discovery of the Higgs boson. A humble software program called HTCondor churned away in the background, helping analyze data gathered from billions of particle collisions. Cut to 2016, and HTCondor is on to a new collision: helping scientists detect gravitational waves caused 1.3 billion years ago by a collision between two black holes 30 times larger than our sun.

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'Four-Flavored' Tetraquark, Planets Born Like Cracking Paint, New 2D Materials, The World's Newest Atom-Smasher in the Physics News Source sponsored by AIP.

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One of the world’s top particle accelerators has reached a milestone, achieving its “first turns” – circulating beams of particles for the first time. Japan’s SuperKEKB accelerator is at the forefront of the “intensity frontier” and is designed to deliver more than 40 times the rate of collisions between particles than its predecessor.

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Our solar system contains one massive object – the sun – and many smaller planets and asteroids. Now researchers from Duke University in Durham, N.C. have proposed a new explanation for the size diversity, which is found throughout the universe and is called hierarchy. The researchers report their finding in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing.

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Scientists on the DZero collaboration at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab, including five physicists from Stony Brook University, have discovered a new particle—the latest member added to the exotic species of particle known as tetraquarks.

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By analyzing the highest-energy proton collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, nuclear physicists have gotten a glimpse of how a multitude of gluons that individually carry very little of the protons’ overall momentum contribute to the protons’ spin.

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A Kansas State University physicist was part of the research team that made a major physics discovery: the detection of gravitational waves and black hole collision.

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After a massive upgrade, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is smashing particles at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV)—nearly twice the energy of its previous run. In just 1 second, it can now produce up to 1 billion collisions and up to 10 gigabytes of data. To deal with the data deluge, ATLAS experiment researchers rely on software developed mainly at Berkeley Lab.

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Although the star-covered night sky is regarded by many as a synonym of serenity, the cosmos is in fact a rather hostile place. It hosts many extreme environments that would instantaneously eradicate any life nearby. A new space mission is about to reveal this violent nature in greater detail than ever before: On Feb. 17, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched its ASTRO-H satellite – a very precise and sensitive eye for X-rays emerging from hot and energetic processes in space.

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New research demonstrates that particles at the quantum level can in fact be seen as behaving something like billiard balls rolling along a table, and not merely as the probabilistic smears that the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests. But there's a catch - the tracks the particles follow do not always behave as one would expect from "realistic" trajectories, but often in a fashion that has been termed "surrealistic."

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Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley scientists will play a role in a new NASA space telescope project exploring dark energy, alien worlds and the evolution of galaxies, galaxy clusters and the large-scale structure of the universe.

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Members of the International Daya Bay Collaboration, who track the production and flavor-shifting behavior of electron antineutrinos generated at a nuclear power complex in China, have obtained the most precise measurement of these subatomic particles' energy spectrum ever recorded.

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Sean McWilliams, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in West Virginia University's Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, is a member of the research team that detected gravitational waves - invisible ripples in spacetime.

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Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity in 1916, and now, almost exactly 100 years later, the faint ripples across space-time have been found. The advanced Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory (aLIGO) has achieved the first direct measurement.

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The detection of gravitational waves came after a nearly 20-year search – the largest and most ambitious project ever funded by the National Science Foundation – and physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee played an essential role in both computing and data analysis.

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An international team of researchers led by X-ray scientist Christoph Bostedt of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Tais Gorkhover of DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used two special lasers to observe the dynamics of a small sample of xenon as it was heated to a plasma.

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Dark matter hunters around the world pursue three approaches to look for fingerprints of ghostly WIMPs: on the Earth’s surface, underground and in space. Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will take part in a discussion of the global search for dark matter particles at this year’s AAAS Annual Meeting, to be held Feb. 11-15 in Washington, D.C.

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TRIUMF will commemorate the 40th anniversary of commissioning of the world’s largest cyclotron on Tuesday, February 9. The Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, and Terry Beech, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Science will join the celebration.

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Researchers assumed that tiny objects would instantly blow up when hit by extremely intense light from the world’s most powerful X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. But to their astonishment, these nanoparticles initially shrank instead – a finding that provides a glimpse of the unusual world of superheated nanomaterials that could eventually also help scientists further develop X-ray techniques for taking atomic images of individual molecules.

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Almost every particle has an antimatter counterpart: a particle with the same mass but opposite charge, among other qualities. But certain characteristics of neutrinos and antineutrinos make scientists wonder: Are they one and the same? Are neutrinos their own antiparticles?

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Scientists push boundaries of antimatter research in quest for answers.

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Stan Brodsky, a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has received the 2015 Pomeranchuk Prize from the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow, Russia. He shares the award with Russian physicist Victor Fadin.

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The Project 8 collaboration constructed a prototype instrument to demonstrate a new electron spectroscopy technique that could be used for a next-generation tritium endpoint experiment.

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New research suggests that the hot, dense “soup” of particles that existed in the early universe was “stirred” by a magnetic wave that pushed around the positively and negative charged particles, according to scientists in the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

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In April 2015, after traveling for about half the age of the universe, a flood of powerful gamma rays from a distant galaxy slammed into Earth's atmosphere. That torrent generated a cascade of light - a shower that fell onto the waiting mirrors of the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) in Arizona. The resulting data have given astronomers a unique look into that faraway galaxy and the black hole engine at its heart.

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In this Q&A, Particle Physics and Astrophysics Professor Lance Dixon of Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory explains one approach to developing such a theory, called quantum gravity.

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Researchers used a powerful, custom-built X-ray microscope at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to directly observe the magnetic version of a soliton, a type of wave that can travel without resistance. Scientists are exploring whether such magnetic waves can be used to carry and store information in a new, more efficient form of computer memory that requires less energy and generates less heat.

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A new space telescope will soon peer into the darkness of 'near space' (within a few thousand light years of Earth) to seek answers related to the field of high-energy astrophysics.

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Members of Fermilab's Technical Division recently achieved a record-high quality factor with a fully dressed cavity for a SLAC-headed project, Linac Coherent Light Source II.

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Peering at the debris from particle collisions that recreate the conditions of the very early universe, scientists have for the first time measured the force of interaction between pairs of antiprotons. Like the force that holds ordinary protons together within the nuclei of atoms, the force between antiprotons is attractive and strong. The experiments were conducted at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory and will publish in Nature.

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To help tackle the considerable challenge of interpreting data, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory are demonstrating the potential of simulating collision events with Mira, a 10-petaflops IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

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To uncover the secrets of neutrinos, scientists build massive detectors to help them spot these elusive particles. The latest, dubbed MicroBooNE, recently spotted its first accelerator-born neutrino event candidates at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Scientists from nearly 30 institutions, including the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, collaborate on this experiment.

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Nestled inside the massive MicroBooNE detector, part of a new neutrino experiment just getting underway at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, lie 50 circuit boards packed with custom-built microelectronics. These circuits were designed by engineers at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory to operate while immersed in liquid argon, a cryogenic liquid that boils at a biting -186 degrees Celsius or -303 degrees Fahrenheit.