nuclear confereneces

  International Conference on Nuclear Physics When a massive star explodes in a supernova , if it isn’t completely destroyed, it will leave behind either a black hole or a neutron star. These enigmatic cosmic objects are especially mysterious because of the crushing internal pressures resulting from neutron stars’ incredible density and the perplexing properties of the nuclear matter they are made of. Now, an international team of researchers has for the first time combined data from heavy-ion experiments, gravitational wave measurements, and other astronomical observations using advanced theoretical modeling to more precisely constrain the properties of nuclear matter as it can be found in the interior of neutron stars . The results were published on June 8, 2022, in the journal Nature. Throughout the Universe, neutron stars are born in supernova explosions that mark the end of the life of massive stars. Sometimes neutron stars are bound in binary systems and will eventually coll...

International Conference on Nuclear Physics   EAST LANSING, MI – The International Research Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (IReNA), supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and headquartered at Michigan State University (MSU), brings together nuclear physicists, astronomers, and computational scientists to try to answer a long-standing question in science: Where do the elements that make up our world come from? Founded in 2019, IReNA continues to expand its global reach for cooperation to advance knowledge in nuclear astrophysics, and now welcomes a new network partner: the Ibero-American Network of Nuclear Astrophysics (IANNA). IReNA and IANNA have joined forces to combine their expertise, resources, and access to cutting-edge technology. IANNA was created in 2022 to foster collaborations related to nuclear astrophysics between research institutions in Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, and the United States (U.S.). IANNA not only advances the understanding of...

  International Conference on Nuclear Physics These stellar events help forge the universe's chemical elements, and Spartans helped explore their nature with an intense isotope beam and a custom experimental device with record-setting sensitivity at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, or NSCL. The team published its work May 3 in the journal Physical Review Letters. "We've been working on this project for about five years, so it's really exciting to see this paper come out," said Christopher Wrede, a professor of physics at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, and in MSU's Department of Physics and Astronomy. Wrede, an MSU/FRIB faculty member, led the international research project. NSCL was a National Science Foundation facility that served the scientific community for decades. FRIB, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility, officially launched on May 2. Now, FRIB will usher in a new era of experiments that empower r...

International Conference on Nuclear Physics  At 1:03 a.m. PST on December 5, researchers with the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif., ignited controlled nuclear fusion that, for the first time, resulted in the net production of energy. A 3-million-joule burst emerged from a peppercorn-sized capsule of fuel when it was heated with a 2-million-joule laser pulse. Details of the long-awaited achievement, which mimics how the sun makes energy, were revealed in a news conference December 13 by U.S. Department of Energy officials. “This is a monumental breakthrough,” says physicist Gilbert Collins of the University of Rochester in New York, who is a former NIF collaborator but was not involved with the research leading to the latest advance. “Since I started in this field, fusion was always 50 years away…. With this achievement, the landscape has changed.” Fusion potentially provides a clean energy source. The fission reactors now used to generate nuclear energy rely on heavy...

International Conference on Nuclear Physics When odds are equal, particles paired up with others of the same kind more often than once thought. The protons and neutrons, which make up the atom’s nucleus, frequently pair up. Now, a new high-precision experiment has found that these particles may pick different partners depending on how packed the nucleus is. The work was conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The findings also reveal new details about short-distance interactions between protons and neutrons in nuclei and may impact results from experiments seeking to tease out deeper details of nuclear structure. The data are an order of magnitude more precise than in previous studies, and the research will be published today (August 31, 2022) in the journal Nature. Shujie Li is the lead author on the paper. She is a nuclear physics postdoctoral researcher at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California an...

  International Conference on Nuclear Physics Largely known for its luxury cars, Rolls-Royce has decided to apply its expertise in crafting durable, enduring engines to space exploration! After over a century of ruling the automotive industry and manufacturing aircraft engines, marine propulsion systems, and power-generation systems, the company decided to dip its toes in the space sector when it signed a contract with the UK Space Agency in 2021. And determined as Rolls-Royce was to study future nuclear power solutions that would be required in space in the decades to come, it has unveiled its novel nuclear micro-reactor for space travel and moon bases. Nuclear power offers significant advantages in space exploration, are sustainable and usually use uranium as their fuel because of the abundant energy in this element. However, Rolls-Royce claimed that each uranium particle in their reactor would be encapsulated in multiple protective layers, acting as a containment system, allowin...

International Conference on Nuclear Physics  How big is an atom? On the order of ångströms, scientists agree, but putting a precise figure on a given element is trickier. For ions and molecules, even more so. Answers have been offered from a variety of empirical sources, with everything from compressibility and crystal structure to optical refraction and electrical polarity being used to quantify what is known as the Van der Waals radius – named after the scientist who theorised finite molecular size in gases. Researchers have also turned to quantum mechanics and computation, calculating electron wavefunctions – the clouds of probability that surround atoms – and using a sensible cut-off value to mark out an atomic boundary. A team at the University of Oregon, US, has now proposed a new metric: the electric field that surrounds every atom. Led by Christopher Hendon , they have developed a software package to calculate this electric field, which arises under the net influence of th...

  International Conference on Nuclear Physics  The shape of heavy nuclei changes as the energy level varies. The universe is governed by four fundamental forces that dictate the interactions between particles and shape the world we know. These forces include the electromagnetic force, gravity, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force. These fundamental forces act on everything from the tiniest atoms to the largest galaxies in the universe. A recent study from the Argonne National Laboratory and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has brought researchers closer to understanding the strong nuclear force, one of the most enigmatic of the fundamental forces. Their work builds on foundational theories of atomic structures that originated with Argonne physicist and Nobel Prize winner Maria Goeppert Mayer in the early 1960s. She helped develop a mathematical model for the structure of nuclei. Her model explained ​why certain numbers of protons and neutrons in the nu...

  International Conference on Nuclear Physics Photons of light are massless particles that are essentially packets of energy. Because of a quantum-mechanical phenomenon known as wave-particle duality , particles can behave like waves, and photons are no different. Photons have wavelengths, and the amplitude of their wavelength determines where they sit on the electromagnetic spectrum . Radio and microwave photons sit at the lower energy, longer wavelength end of the spectrum, while in the shorter wavelength, higher-energy regime are photons of ultraviolet, X-rays and the most energetic of them all with the shortest wavelengths: gamma rays. Gamma rays have wavelengths shorter than 10^-11 meters and frequencies above 30 x 10^18 hertz. The European Space Agency describes how gamma-ray photons have  energies in excess of 100,000 electronvolts (opens in new tab) (eV). We can compare this to X-rays, which NASA describes as having energies  between 100 eV and 100,000 eV (opens i...

  International Conference on Nuclear Physics  In the third in a series of articles on the production of N*s for The Innovation Platform, Lamar University’s Professor Philip L Cole discusses the importance of using both high-intensity pion and electron beams for revealing the inner structure of excited protons (N*s) in the second and third resonance regions that decay through the two-pion channel. We seek to understand how quarks and gluons self-assemble and thereby emerge in forming protons and neutrons. We therefore seek a better understanding of the nature of the proton – a particle central to physics, chemistry, and the biochemical properties of life. Recent results from interrogating protons with polarized photon and electron beams at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia , have given us precise information on the substructure of protons and their excitations, leading us to a deeper understanding of the proton. Laboratories in Germany (HADES at GSI) and soon Japan (E45 ...