*Students are blogging about their internship experiences from destinations as far away as Switzerland and Africa.*
At the University of Arizona, summer internships matter.
Three graduate students from the UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health are working as interns across the globe this summer. (more…)
*By comparing theory with data from STAR, Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues map phase changes in the quark-gluon plasma*
In its infancy, when the universe was a few millionths of a second old, the elemental constituents of matter moved freely in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. As the universe expanded, this quark–gluon plasma quickly cooled, and protons and neutrons and other forms of normal matter “froze out”: the quarks became bound together by the exchange of gluons, the carriers of the color force.
“The theory that describes the color force is called quantum chromodynamics, or QCD,” says Nu Xu of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the spokesperson for the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. “QCD has been extremely successful at explaining interactions of quarks and gluons at short distances, such as high-energy proton and antiproton collisions at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. But in bulk collections of matter – including the quark-gluon plasma – at longer distances or smaller momentum transfer, an approach called lattice gauge theory has to be used.” (more…)
*Berkeley Lab physicists join with their international colleagues in reaching a new frontier in antimatter science*
The ALPHA Collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, has reported storing a total of 309 atoms of antihydrogen, some for up to 1,000 seconds (almost 17 minutes), with an indication of much longer storage time as well.
ALPHA announced in November, 2010, that they had succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for the first time ever, having captured 38 atoms of antihydrogen and storing each for a sixth of a second. In the weeks following, ALPHA continued to collect anti-atoms and hold them for longer and longer times. (more…)
Nearly 14 billion years ago, the universe began with a bang — a big one.
Scientists believe that the universe and everything within it began as an extremely hot, dense “soup” that eventually gave rise to galaxies, stars, planets and life and that continues to expand to this day.
Now scientists around the world are pushing back the frontiers of our understanding about the moment the universe was born using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a giant particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. (more…)
