Science Highlights

Data on Lambda particle formation came from experiments in Experimental Hall B, shown here, part of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility.

Teasing Strange Matter from Ordinary

New insights reveal details of how strange matter forms.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory chemist Isaac Arnquist examines the ‘coupons’ of ultra-low radiation copper cables specially created for sensitive physics detection experiments.

Creating Quiet Cables for Rare Physics Events

Researchers design ultra-low radiation cables to reduce background noise for highly sensitive nuclear decay and dark matter detectors.

Understanding Charged-Particle Bound States in Periodic Boxes

Finite geometry reveals fundamental properties of charged quantum systems.

The floating block method pictured as ice blocks and the sea. The method applies a filtering process called imaginary time evolution to two Hamiltonians, represented by ice and sea. It gives the overlap between the two Hamiltonians’ lowest energy states.

Computing How Quantum States Overlap

The floating block method provides the tools to compute how quantum states overlap and how to build fast and accurate emulators of those systems.

Image of the emission of 4 neutrons (blue spheres) from the exotic nucleus oxygen-28, which consists of 8 protons (red spheres) and 20 neutrons.

Not-Quite “Magic” Oxygen-28 Observed for the First Time

An almost-bound isotope of oxygen undergoes four-neutron decay that challenges theory.

The modified Majorana module in the assembly glovebox with germanium detector crystals and tantalum samples installed.

Searching for the Decay of Nature’s Rarest Isotope: Tantalum-180m

The first results from the MAJORANA experiment dramatically improve current limits on this rare isotope’s decay.

Nitrogen-9 decays by first emitting one proton, generating carbon-8, then two protons, generating beryllium-6, and finally two more protons, with the resulting residue of a stable alpha particle.

The “Nested Doll” Nucleus Nitrogen-9 Stretches the Definition of a Nucleus to the Limit

Nitrogen-9 has only two neutrons to its seven protons and decays to an alpha particle by emitting five of its protons in stages.

Schematic illustration of the density of the Dirichlet distribution for true model mixing.

Statisticians and Physicists Team Up to Bring a Machine Learning Approach to Mining of Nuclear Data

Bayesian statistical methods help improve the predictability of complex computational models in experimentally unknown research.

A proton’s valence quarks (blue, red, and green), quark-antiquark pairs, and gluons (springs). Scalar gluon activity (pink) extends beyond the electric charge radius (orange) that surrounds the gluonic energy core (yellow).

Scientists Locate the Missing Mass Inside the Proton

Nuclear physicists have found the location of matter inside the proton that comes from the strong force - a fundamental force that holds protons together.

Measuring the Thickness of the Neutron Skin with Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Researchers determined the neutron skin of lead-208 from experimental data collected in lead-lead collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.

Electrons emitted in radioactive beta decay in a magnetic field create radio waves or microwaves, which are then picked up by antennas to learn about the decay process and the particles they produce.

Physicists Remotely Sense Radioactive Decay to Probe Fundamental Forces and Particles

The Project 8 and He6-CRES collaborations use a new technique to set an upper limit on neutrino mass and prepare to test the nature of the weak force.