Keeping the lights on nationwide is a feat of engineering that depends on millions of miles of power lines and thousands of power-generation plants.
Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe, but they are also among the most elusive. Nearly massless, they are produced by nuclear reactions in the sun, exploding stars, particle accelerators and even ...
For the first time, a team of physicists in the U.S. has clearly demonstrated a "helicon current drive" in a nuclear fusion experiment. Led by Jeff Lestz at General Atomics, San Diego, the team took advantage of the latest ...
Producers, consumers, and decomposers play different roles in today's ecosystems. Thinking about these familiar roles led me to a question: Could their differences partly reflect the different physical and chemical environments ...
Understanding instabilities and turbulence in plasmas is one of the key challenges across a wide range of plasma research fields, including nuclear fusion, astrophysics and laser-plasma physics. In plasmas, slight disturbances ...
Do cosmic radiation doses near the moon differ significantly from those received by astronauts in low Earth orbit? Experimental lithium fluoride detectors, installed aboard the Orion spacecraft during the Artemis I mission, ...
If you wanted a Nobel Prize, you would do well to study neutrinos. To date, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded five times to research related to neutrino detection and discovery. This year, Francis Halzen earned ...
Researchers at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have measured the shortest high-energy X-ray pulses ever recorded at an X-ray free-electron laser ...
For the first time, Northwestern University physicists have coaxed a single positron—the antimatter counterpart of an electron—into an exquisitely controlled quantum state.
New results from the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) provide strong evidence that smashing oxygen nuclei together at nearly the speed of light generates a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a type of ...
