- Number 360 |
- April 9, 2012
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First message transmitted via neutrinos
Scientists have for decades contemplated communicating via neutrinos when other methods won’t do. For the first time, physicists and engineers have successfully transmitted a message through 240 meters of rock using the ghost-like particles.
“It’s beginning to look more feasible,” said Dan Stancil, professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University, who had proposed the recent neutrino communication test.
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Supercomputing the difference between matter and antimatter
Using breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers — located at DOE labs and elsewhere — an international collaboration has reported a landmark calculation of a kind of subatomic particle decay that’s important to understanding matter/antimatter asymmetry. The research helps nail down the exact process of kaon decay, and is also inspiring the development of a new generation of supercomputers.
The present calculation — carried out by physicists from DOE's Brookhaven Lab, Columbia University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Edinburgh, the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, the RIKEN BNL Research Center (RBRC), the University of Southampton, and Washington University — describes one aspect of how a kaon decays into two pions. This is the same subatomic particle decay explored in a 1964 Nobel Prize-winning experiment performed at DOE’s Brookhaven Lab, which revealed the first experimental evidence of charge-parity (CP) violation — a lack of symmetry between particles and their corresponding antiparticles. Exploring the precise details of kaon decay could help elucidate how and why today’s universe is composed almost exclusively of matter with virtually no antimatter to be found — one of the most profound questions in science today. -
Scientists use SLAC’s X-ray laser to see photovoltaic process in action
A surprising atomic-scale wiggle underlies the way a special class of materials reacts to light, according to research at DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory that may lead to new devices for harvesting solar energy.
For decades, scientists have known that some ferroelectric materials – materials that possess a stable electrical polarization switchable by an external electric field – are also photovoltaic: They produce an electric voltage when exposed to light, just as solar cells do. But it was not clear how the light induced voltages in these materials. -
Clouds get in the way
Using 10 years of data gathered at three unique Atmospheric Radiation Measurement sites, scientists at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that global climate models are not representing just how much clouds mask the sun's warming energy. And for the first time, scientists used data on the spatial coverage, height, and transparency of the clouds to inform climate models. They found the relative monthly and annual differences among three cloud fraction datasets at each site are small. However, comparing observations with a dozen global models used in the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report shows that cloud coverage is significantly misrepresented in the models, by up to 150 percent at one site.
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Small modular reactor design could be a 'SUPERSTAR'
Though most of today's nuclear reactors are cooled by water, we've long known that there are alternatives; in fact, the world's first nuclear-powered electricity in 1951 came from a reactor cooled by sodium. Reactors cooled by liquid metals such as sodium or lead have a unique set of abilities that may again make them significant players in the nuclear industry.
At DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, a team led by senior nuclear engineer James Sienicki has designed a new small reactor cooled by lead—the Sustainable Proliferation-resistance Enhanced Refined Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor, or SUPERSTAR for short.
