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Nuclear Science Division

Recent News

  • Applications Now Open for New Darleane Hoffman Fellowship

    Applications for a new fellowship named for Nuclear Science Division scientist Darleane Hoffman are now being accepted. The fellowship is open to all postdocs who are working in fields related to the Department of Energy’s nuclear nonproliferation mission. 

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  • SNO+ researchers unveil new findings: reactor neutrinos detected by water

    In this new paper in Physical Review Letters, researchers in the SNO+ Collaboration – including Gabriel Orebi Gann (Nuclear Science Division and UC Berkeley Physics Department) and Logan Lebanowski (UC Berkeley Physics and NSD Affiliate) – have reported the first signals in a water-filled Cherenkov neutrino detector from neutrinos emitted by a nuclear reactor. Their […]

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  • First Experimental Results from FRIB Led by NSD

    A new DOE Office of Science Highlight features the first experimental results from FRIB from a team led by NSD’s Heather Crawford.

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  • Fragments

    In February, the final results from the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR were published in Physical Review Letters.  The results set a limit on the half-life of the neutrinoless double beta decay of Ge-76. NSD Senior Scientist Volker Koch has been named as an Outstanding Referee by the Physical Review journals, as chosen by the journal editors for […]

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  • Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accountability Moments

    In 2019, the American Physical Society (APS) formed an Ethics Committee (EC), charged to provide guidance on how the APS can promote ethical behavior by members, and police unethical behavior, including scientific ethics (fabrication, falsification or plagiarism) and interpersonal misbehavior – sexual harassment or bullying, for example. EC member and NSD Senior Scientist Spencer Klein discussed EC activities at a recent NSD staff meeting and summarizes those activities here.

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  • Applied Nuclear Physics Program Aiding Clean-up of Cold War-Era Radioactive Contamination through Radiological Mapping

    From 1955–1988, low-level waste solutions from the processing of uranium and irradiated nuclear fuel were discharged into unlined earthen storage basins at the Savannah River Site (SRS) F-Area [1]. Over the decades, radioactive contaminants including uranium and iodine-129 (I-129) have leaked out of the basins and into the groundwater of the surrounding wetlands, and are […]

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  • Exploring Machine Learning at VENUS

    In 2021, a collaboration of NSD scientists from the Applied Nuclear Physics, Low-Energy Nuclear Physics, and the 88” Cyclotron programs received funding through a DOE Office of Science FOA for “Data Analytics for Autonomous Optimization and Control of Accelerators and Detectors” to explore application of machine learning approaches to the operations of both the VENUS ion source [ 1 ] and the GRETA γ-ray detector array.

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  • Understanding the Origin of Matter with the CUORE Experiment

    Physicists use a detector under an Italian mountain to search for rare nuclear processes to explain why our Universe has more matter than antimatter. There is so much that we do not yet know about neutrinos. Neutrinos are very light, chargeless, and elusive particles that are involved in a process named beta decay and that can help […]

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  • A New Dimension to the Jet-induced Mach Cone in the Subatomic QGP Droplets

    Projectiles traveling at a speed greater than the velocity of sound generate Mach cones, such as the sonic boom originating from a supersonic aircraft. These kinds of Mach cones are also produced on the femtometer scale inside the droplets of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) by propagating jets in high-energy heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-ion Collider […]

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  • Director’s Corner

    In March we celebrated Women’s History Month and in this context it is very fitting for Darleane C. Hoffman, a pioneering nuclear chemist, to receive the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award. We continue to celebrate and honor the contributions of all women in the Nuclear Science Division, past and present.  During the past month, numerous events […]

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