On March 20th, over 60 students and teachers from Bay Area high schools visited the Lab for High School STEM Day, a monthly program hosted by Berkeley Lab’s K-12 STEM Education and Outreach Program in collaboration with the Women’s Support and Empowerment Council (WSEC). The program featured talks about science, technology, and engineering efforts Lab-wide, and included tours of the Engineering Division’s Fabrication and Composites Shops and the 88-Inch Cyclotron (part of the Nuclear Science Division), as well as the Advanced Light Source (ALS), the Integrative Genomics Building (IGB), and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).
Collaboration Fuels High-Speed, Data-Intensive Research to Understand How Nuclei Decay
A technical evaluation using data from a recent scientific-user experiment demonstrated how ESnet enables researchers at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) – led by Heather Crawford, a staff scientist in the Nuclear Science Division – to send large amounts of data across the country, analyze it in near real-time, and return results, enabling quicker data-informed experimental choices.
Berkeley Lab’s Physics and Nuclear Science Divisions host an ‘open house’ for prospective UC Berkeley graduate students on March 15
On March 15, Berkeley Lab’s Physics and Nuclear Science Divisions hosted Lab tours and information sessions as part of the UC Berkeley Physics Department’s two-day open house event for prospective graduate students interested in pursuing research careers in nuclear and particle physics as well as cosmology.
New Method Could Explore Gluon Saturation at the Future Electron-Ion Collider
Theorists propose nucleon energy-energy correlator as a probe to the gluon saturation phenomena at the future electron-ion collider.
The Science
The U.S. nuclear physics community is preparing to build the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a flagship facility for probing the properties of matter and the strong nuclear force that holds matter together. The EIC will allow scientists to study how nucleons (protons and neutrons) arise from the complex interactions of quarks and gluons. The EIC will also help scientists examine gluon saturation. This occurs when gluons are densely concentrated at high energy levels. It results in the gluons splitting and recombining at the same rate, balancing out these processes. EIC measurements of this behavior will help answer important questions in physics.
Tests begin on Berkeley Lab’s Eos experiment
A sensitive new neutrino detector being built at UC Berkeley merges two types of neutrino detectors into one, for applications in nonproliferation as well as physics.
A new type of neutrino detector now being tested in a vast underground lab at the University of California, Berkeley, is designed to leverage the latest technologies to enhance the sensitivity and capabilities of antineutrino detectors. Such improved detectors would not only help detect, localize and characterize undeclared special nuclear material being used contrary to federal or international regulations, but also help scientists explore the fundamental physics of particles and their interactions deep in the nucleus of the atom.
Called Eos, for the Titan goddess of dawn, the apparatus signals “the dawn of a new era of neutrino detection technology,” according to Gabriel Orebi Gann, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division, an associate professor of physics at UC Berkeley, and the leader of the Eos collaboration.
Eos is a 10-meter tall, 5-meter-wide cylinder filled with water and an organic scintillator and surrounded by light detectors three times more sensitive than those used in physics experiments today. Eos’s improved sensitivity and higher resolution come from combining two of today’s best techniques for detecting neutrinos: scintillation and Cherenkov emission.
The improvements could be a game changer for future neutrino physics projects, such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) now being constructed in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, to detect neutrinos emitted by a particle accelerator at Fermi National Laboratory, 500 miles away in Illinois. UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab are members of the DUNE collaboration.
“What we would ultimately like to build is a much bigger detector called Theia,” she said. “Theia is the Titan goddess of light and Eos’s mother in the pantheon of gods. The ideal location for Theia is in that mine in South Dakota, seeing those neutrinos from Fermilab.”
The prototype detector is funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which funds research and development at Department of Energy (DOE) labs to further the nation’s ability to detect, prevent, counter and respond to nuclear security threats — in the case of this research, to detect and characterize nuclear activities and materials remotely, that is, at distances greater than about 100 meters. While radioactivity from nuclear material can be shielded from detection, antineutrinos produced in fission reactions cannot. Because billions are produced in a reactor each nanosecond, Eos should be able to detect enough of them to identify clandestine production of bomb-grade material.
Read the full article:
Tests begin on sensitive neutrino detector for nonproliferation as well as physics
March 15, 2024 / Bob Sanders / UC Berkeley News
Divining the mysteries of the atomic nucleus
Heather Crawford and Berkeley Lab’s GRETA project are featured in this recent article in ‘Chemical and Engineering News,’ which highlights how new research is illuminating the most powerful force in the universe.
Heather Crawford, a staff scientist in the Nuclear Science Division, is Deputy Project Director for the construction of Berkeley Lab’s Gamma-Ray Energy Tracking Array (GRETA), which will be installed in the University of Michigan’s Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) later this year.
Read the full article in Chemical and Engineering News:
Divining the mysteries of the atomic nucleus: New research at the edge of the nuclear landscape is illuminating the most powerful force in the universe and teaching scientists how elements are forged in stars.
January 28, 2024 / by Katherine Bourzac / Chemical and Engineering News
- « Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- …
- 9
- Next Page »