Cross Section

The first 'negative triangularity' nuclear reactor has achieved first plasma. What else will it achieve?

A novel way of making superheavy elements could soon add a new row to the periodic table, allowing scientists to explore uncharted atomic realms

What constitutes protons? When I see pictures, I can't understand. Protons are made of quarks, but some say that they are made of 99% empty space. Also, in this illustration from Wikipedia, what's

The field of photonic integrated circuits focuses on the miniaturization of photonic elements and their integration in photonic chips—circuits that carry out a range of calculations using photons, rather than electrons as are used in electronic circuits.

In a new study, scientists report results from the PandaX-4T experiment, setting stringent limits on dark matter–nucleon interactions using low-energy data and the Migdal effect, ruling out significant parameter space for a thermal relic dark-matter model.

The protons and neutrons in a nucleus can form clusters analogous to atoms in a molecule, even in the nuclear ground state.

The fact that nanoparticle and polymer hybrid materials can often combine the advantages of each has been demonstrated in several fields. Embedding PNCs into polymer is an effective strategy to enhance the PNCs stability and polymer can endow the PNCs with other positive effects based on different structure and functional groups.

The results of the Chi-Nu physics experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory have contributed essential, never-before-observed data for enhancing nuclear security applications, understanding criticality safety and designing fast-neutron energy reactors. The Chi-Nu project, a years-long experiment measuring the energy spectrum of neutrons emitted from neutron-induced fission, recently concluded the most detailed…

Since the 1960s there has been plenty of evidence to support the existence of dark matter through astrophysical and cosmological observations, and at this point we're very confident that it exists. The question remains, though: what is dark matter actually made of?

To study atomic nuclei and subatomic particles, scientists use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to collide heavy ions—atomic nuclei completely stripped of their surrounding electrons. In these collisions, the quarks and gluons that normally make up nucleons (protons and neutrons) melt into a new state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma (QGP).

Nanoplastics are plastics that have been discarded from our daily lives and that enter ecosystems in the size scale below 1 μm after their physical and chemical disintegration. Recent research has shown that the concentration of microplastics in the major rivers in South Korea is the highest worldwide; it is not unusual to find news reports about the detection of microplastics in simple tea bags or drinking water.

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Neutrino_Observatory Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33611788 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

When plasma circulates in a highly energized state, it can spurt against the walls of the tokamak, damaging its interior components.

Article URL: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/07/18/Long-Dark-Matter-Links Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32151800 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Sterile neutrino, physics fundamentals among interpretations of anomalous results

Scientists are holding up a "mirror" to protons and neutrons to learn more about the particles that build our visible universe. The MARATHON experiment, carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, has accessed new details about these particles' structures by comparing the so-called mirror nuclei, helium-3 and triton. The results were recently published in Physical…

Researchers have taken a major step towards bringing terahertz frequencies out of their hard-to-reach region of the electromagnetic spectrum and into everyday applications. In a new paper, the researchers demonstrate a first-of-its-kind terahertz laser that is compact, operates at room temperature and can produce 120 individual frequencies spanning the 0.25–1.3 THz, far more range than previous terahertz sources.

Top-quark pair production has been observed in lead-lead collisions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with the ATLAS detector, marking the first observation of this process in interactions between atomic nuclei.

Materials are crucial to modern technology, especially those used in extreme environments like nuclear energy systems and military applications. These materials need to withstand intense pressure, temperature and corrosion. Understanding their lattice-level behavior under such conditions is essential for developing next-generation materials that are more resilient, cheaper, lighter and sustainable.

Contrary to what is established by the standard model, dark matter may indeed be self-interacting. This was the conclusion of a piece of research published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and conducted by Riccardo Valdarnini of SISSA's Astrophysics and Cosmology group. Using numerical simulations, the study analyzed what happens inside "El Gordo" (literally "The Fat One" in Spanish), a giant cluster merger seven…