U.S. Department of Energy Research News

10-Nov-2009
An electron zap turns flimsy plastic into sturdy shrink wrap
If you buy a Butterball turkey this Thanksgiving, you have particle accelerators to thank for its freshness. For decades now the food industry has used particle accelerators to produce the sturdy, heat-shrinkable film that Butterballs come wrapped in.

16-Jul-2009
Dark Energy Camera scans ancient skies
Scientists wonder why the universe is expanding ever faster. What mysterious force is at work? By recording the light from hundreds of millions of galaxies from a mountaintop in Chile, they hope to find out what's going on.

20-Jan-2006
eco-science
Stepping onto the site of a physics laboratory, you might expect to see enormous accelerators, ultra-powerful supercomputers, or scientists in lab coats racing between experiments. At one lab, however, what you will actually see are goats. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, goats roam through the hills, push over fences, and climb trees.

6-Jan-2006
The search for extra dimensions
Although we now think of the universe as three bulky, nearly-flat dimensions, we might soon discover that the fabric of space-time consists of many more dimensions than we ever dreamed.

9-Nov-2005
Meet the grid
Today's cutting-edge scientific projects are larger, more complex, and more expensive than ever. Grid computing provides the resources that allow researchers to share knowledge, data, and computer processing power across boundaries.

12-Oct-2005
Asymmetric insight
Like climbers assessing a new route before making the ascent, physicists have been looking for footholds on a vertiginous new terrain. These footholds contain important information for trekking to TeV heights (the lofty trillion electron volts energy scales of future colliders).

12-Oct-2005
Super-fast super-sensitive detectors
Only detectors with the greatest precision capabilities will measure up to the machine seeking to explore supersymmetry, dark matter, the Higgs mechanism, and new physics that hasn't yet been imagined. Their shapes and configurations might be familiar, but their inner workings�the materials and electronics charged with creating views of new physics�will carry a symbolic branding: "Product of the 21st century."

19-Aug-2005
In their hands: The future of particle physics
Particle physics is at a critical time, and its future depends on how well scientists can make their case to a diverse National Academy of Sciences panel.

19-Aug-2005
The compact linear collider
As the Global Design Effort for the proposed International Linear Collider starts to take shape, an international collaboration of scientists simultaneously works on an alternative linear collider technology that pushes physics and engineering to the edge.

4-Apr-2005
X-ray blaze on an invisible world
The way that a horse trots intrigued Leland Stanford. After a term as California's governor and with a fortune assembled from building the US transcontinental railway, Stanford lived the life of a country gentleman near his Palo Alto Stock Farm.

4-Apr-2005
Science from a hole in the ground
When Alice famously went down the rabbit hole, she ended up in Wonderland. Now, a group of US scientists from fields as diverse as microbiology and particle physics, rock mechanics and molecular evolution are proposing to go down their own version of the rabbit hole into the scientific wonderland of a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory.

9-Feb-2005
Beyond the standard model
At almost any particle physics conference, meeting, or lunch table, the phrase "physics beyond the Standard Model" is heard over and over again. What's wrong with the Standard Model, anyway? Why are physicists so sure that there is something beyond it? And why do they think they can find it anytime soon?

9-Feb-2005
Let it rain
Toward the end of a ten-year experiment in 1991, postdoc Hungye Dai of the University of Utah was puzzling over some really unusual data. The experiment was Fly's Eye, which pioneered a new method of studying ultra-high-energy cosmic rays by monitoring the faint flashes of ultraviolet light produced in the sky when the particles hit the upper atmosphere.

9-Feb-2005
Sold on cold
One hot day in August, particle physicists turned cold. That's the day the International Technology Recommendation Panel (ITRP) announced the decision to pursue "cold" superconducting technology for what physicists hope will be the world's next big particle accelerator, the International Linear Collider. Going cold, instead of recommending a "warm" option that had also been under development, has far-reaching consequences for laboratories, scientists, industries and governments across the globe. What does "cold" mean, and why did particle physics choose superconducting technology?

9-Feb-2005
Extreme neutrinos
Kurt Woschnagg has been waiting nine days to catch a plane to the South Pole. He flew for 15 hours from San Francisco to New Zealand, waited several days to spend another eight hours in a cargo plane to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, only to wait again for the weather to clear.

9-Feb-2005
The growth of inflation
It was a true Eureka moment if there ever was one. On the night of December 6, 1979, an obscure Stanford Linear Accelerator Center postdoc was up late, sweating over an even more obscure problem about particles called magnetic monopoles. Looking at his calculations the next day, the usually low-key Alan Guth annotated the words "Spectacular Realization" at the top of the page. Guth had discovered cosmic inflation, an idea which some have later called the most important in cosmology since the big bang.

1-Mar-2004
Dance of the planes
Less than four years after breaking ground at Fermilab for an underground complex consisting of 4,000 feet of tunnels and two experimental halls, scientists of the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search collaboration are preparing for the first components of a 1,000-ton neutrino detector to go underground. Technicians will lower the first of 282 octagonal-shaped detector planes--each weighing more than a pickup truck--down a 350-foot shaft on the Fermilab site in March.

1-Mar-2004
The sensitive giant
CERN's Large Hadron Collider, set to begin operations later this decade, will boast four new detectors around its 16-mile ring. Fermilab is heavily involved in the Compact Muon Solenoid, but the LHC is constructing another huge multipurpose detector in competition for discovery of the Higgs particle and several other fundamental targets: ATLAS, A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS.

1-Mar-2004
Budget talks
Flat budgets, visa roadblocks, contract competition and the search for a new director stood out as the hot topics at the Universities Research Association's annual Council of Presidents meeting on February 4 at the National Academy of Sciences. And with the unveiling of the Department of Energy's FY05 budget request only days before the meeting, it came as no surprise when funding concerns took center stage.

1-Mar-2004
Good neighbor policy
In a major step toward strengthening relationships with its neighbors, Fermilab is forming a Community Task Force on Public Participation with about 25 representatives from DuPage, Kane and DeKalb Counties.

1-Mar-2004
The power of one
Plans and hopes for a Linear Collider chart a straight course toward unification.

19-Feb-2004
A new layer of sensitivity
Fermilab scientists are adding a new front line to the battery of sensors inside the giant DZero detector. They've just completed the design of a new set of sensors, to be installed in a very confined space, which will give new life to the experiment.

19-Feb-2004
DZero breaks new ground in global computing efforts
Searching for subatomic particles very much resembles the often-cited search for the needle in the haystack. Since the beginning of Collider Run II in March 2001, DZero scientists have collected more than 550 million particle collisions. The data fill five stacks of CDs as high as the Eiffel tower--storage cases not included. And the (hay)stacks are growing every day.

19-Feb-2004
NLC collaboration reaches critical high-power X-band goal
The team, part of the U.S.-Japanese Next Linear Collider-Global Linear Collider collaboration, is working on X-band accelerator technology (for the so-called "warm" linear collider). The international particle physics community is also considering another technology option for the linear collider: superconducting radiofrequency technology, being pursued by the TESLA collaboration led by DESY in Germany.

1-Jan-2004
Are we ready for the dark side?
Simply put, dark energy is a mystery. The expansion of the universe is accelerating, and theorists believe that dark energy is the driving force behind it. Evidence shows that dark energy makes up approximately 70 percent of the universe, meaning 25 percent is dark matter and 4 percent is matter made of atoms.