Multicolored laser light is the key to cooling these atoms to nearly absolute zero
UCLA physicists have shown that shining multicolored laser light on rubidium atoms causes them to lose energy and cool to nearly absolute zero. This result suggests that atoms fundamental to chemistry, such as hydrogen and carbon, could also be cooled using similar lasers, an outcome that would allow researchers to study the details of chemical reactions involved in medicine.(more…)
Berkeley Lab’s nanotechnology enlivens Nanosys’ displays, enhancing the color and saving energy.
Outside his career as a noted nanochemist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) director Paul Alivisatos is an avid photographer. To show off his photos, his preferred device is a Kindle Fire HDX tablet because “the color display is a whole lot better than other tablets,” he says. (more…)
Princeton University researchers have built a rice grain-sized laser powered by single electrons tunneling through artificial atoms known as quantum dots. The tiny microwave laser, or “maser,” is a demonstration of the fundamental interactions between light and moving electrons. (more…)
Two large collaborations of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made worldwide news in July 2012 when they announced independent observations of the elusive Higgs boson particle — a discovery hailed as one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of recent decades.
This so-called “God particle” was first postulated some 50 years ago as a crucial element of the modern theory of the forces of nature — it is, physicists say, what gives everything in the universe mass — and it had been the subject of worldwide searches ever since. (more…)
Berkeley Lab scientists develop a new nanotech tool to probe solar-energy conversion
If nanoscience were television, we’d be in the 1950s. Although scientists can make and manipulate nanoscale objects with increasingly awesome control, they are limited to black-and-white imagery for examining those objects. Information about nanoscale chemistry and interactions with light—the atomic-microscopy equivalent to color—is tantalizingly out of reach to all but the most persistent researchers.
But that may all change with the introduction of a new microscopy tool from researchers at the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that delivers exquisite chemical details with a resolution once thought impossible. The team developed their tool to investigate solar-to-electric energy conversion at its most fundamental level, but their invention promises to reveal new worlds of data to researchers in all walks of nanoscience. (more…)
Greg Landsberg, professor of physics at Brown, is the physics coordinator for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at CERN in Switzerland, part of a Brown team that includes professors David Cutts, Ultich Heintz, and Meenakshi Narain. The giant instrument’s primary mission is finding the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would confirm the best guess physicists have made about why things have mass.(more…)
Berkeley Lab scientists, major contributors to the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, explain what the excitement is about
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, will hold a seminar early in the morning on July 4 to announce the latest results from ATLAS and CMS, two major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are searching for the Higgs boson. Both experimental teams are working down to the wire to finish analyzing their data, and to determine exactly what can be said about what they’ve found.
“We do not yet know what will be shown on July 4th,” says Ian Hinchliffe, a theoretical physicist in the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), who heads the Lab’s participation in the ATLAS experiment. “I have seen many conjectures on the blogs about what will be shown: these are idle speculation. Things are moving very fast this week, and it’s an exciting time at CERN. Many years of hard work are coming to fruition.” (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, a University of Michigan astronomer and her colleagues have found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.
By pointing Chandra at a patch of sky for over six weeks, astronomers obtained what is known as the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS). When combined with very deep optical and infrared images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the new Chandra data allowed astronomers to search for black holes in 200 distant galaxies, from when the universe was between about 800 million and 950 million years old. (more…)
