"It's a tale as old as time: Boy meets particle accelerator. Boy gets particle accelerator. Particle accelerator trash talks boy when boy's favorite football team wins last year's Super Bowl." Alverno Presents is offering up "Sexy Results, "a rather unusual Cedar Block event at Turner Hall Ballroom on Saturday, Feb. 18. It's a sweet story of science and art.
Todd Johnson's Shockfossils are "multimillion volt Lichtenberg figures in acrylic." He masks acrylic slabs with lead and then rents time on a commercial particle accelerator and the result are beautiful, fern-like fractals. Shockfossils on deviantART
In this month's Physics World, reviews and careers editor, Margaret Harris, visits the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) to explore what future projects are in the pipeline now that the Tevatron particle accelerator has closed for good.
PolygamousRanchKid writes "When completed in 2013, the new research center will wrap around the Collider Detector at Fermilab and provide a state-of-the-art facility for research, development and industrialization of particle accelerator technology. Whereas particle accelerators like Fermilab's now-defunct Tevatron were once the realm of the scientist doing basic research on the nature of the universe, accelerators now have a broader mandate...
(PhysOrg.com) -- Landmark technology that could revolutionise cancer therapy and pave the way for cleaner, safer nuclear reactors in the future, has been published in Nature Physics today. The pioneering EMMA (Electron Model for Many Applications) accelerator is a prototype for a brand new type of particle accelerator that will massively impact fundamental science by changing the way such accelerators across the world are designed and built in...
Scientists working at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created the shortest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved, fulfilling a 45-year-old prediction and opening the door to a new range of scientific discovery. The researchers, reporting today in Nature, aimed SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at a capsule of neon gas, setting off an avalanche of X-ray emissions to create the world's first "atomic X-ray laser." This artist's...Read Full Story
Scientists will soon be exploring matter at temperatures and pressures so extreme it can only be produced for microseconds using powerful pulsed lasers. Matter in such states is present in the Earth's liquid iron core, 2500 kilometres beneath the surface, and also in elusive "warm dense matter" inside large planets like Jupiter. A new X-ray beamline ID24 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, allows a new quality of exploration of the last white spot on our...Read Full Story
This month physicist Juan Collar and his associates are taking their attempt to unmask the secret identity of dark matter into a Canadian mine more than a mile underground.
The team is deploying a 4-kilogram bubble chamber at SNOLab, which is part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada. A second 60-kilogram chamber will follow later this year. Scientists anticipate that dark matter particles will leave bubbles in their tracks when passing through the liquid in one of these...Read Full Story
Scientists from Finland and France have developed a new synchrotron X-ray technique that may revolutionize the chemical analysis of rare materials like meteoric rock samples or fossils. The results have been published on 29 May 2011 in Nature Materials as an advance online publication.
A diamond surrounded by air, and a glass of water. Both contain carbon and oxygen. If they are embedded inside another object, without access for a chemical probe, it is a difficult task to distinguish...Read Full Story
A lightning researcher at the University of Bath has discovered that during thunderstorms, giant natural particle accelerators can form 40 km above the surface of the Earth.
Dr Martin Füllekrug from the University’s Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering presented his new work on Wednesday 14 April at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting (RAS NAM 2010) in Glasgow.
Dr Füllekrug and colleagues have discovered that natural particle accelerators can be formed...Read Full Story