Synchrotrons

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 is the official website of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located near Batavia, Illinois, U.S. The site has a vertical menu on the left with the main sections about the Fermilab activity on high-energy particle physics. Some of this sections are About Fermilab, Science at Fermilab, Plan for the Future, Visiting Fermilab, Education, Events, Publications, and Job Opportunities. The content of the main page has news on Fermilab researches. In the horizontal menu bar...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

Researchers have found that a 150 million year old "dinobird" fossil, long thought to contain nothing but fossilized bone and rock, has been hiding remnants of the animal's original chemistry. Using the bright X-ray beam of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, located at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, an international team of paleontologists, geochemists and physicists has revealed this transformative glimpse into one of the most important fossils...Read Full Story

Sediba child thirteen going on 1.9 million. The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility is expected to shed light on the life of an adolescent from 1.9 million years in the past. One of the best-preserved hominid fossil, recently discovered in South Africa, has already been analyzed with synchrotron light.    Rendering of the 3-D scan of the skull of Australopithecus sediba child  Image credit: European Synchrotron Radiation Facility Palaeoanthropologist Prof. Lee Berger of the...Read Full Story

Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the  Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory  (Batavia, IL) announced Friday, May 14, that they have found evidence for significant violation of matter-antimatter symmetry in the behavior of particles containing bottom quarks beyond what is expected in the current theory, the Standard Model of particle physics. The new result, submitted for publication in Physical Review D by the DZero collaboration, an international team of 500...Read Full Story

Scientists for the first time have dived into the effect that an intense X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) has on materials. Using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) facility at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore scientists probed nitrogen gas at X-ray energies of up to 8 keV (kiloelectronvolts), the highest X-ray energy ever used at an XFEL, to see how it behaved when the laser hit it.  Image credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The...Read Full Story