Tracking Glaciers with Accelerators
Department of Energy, Office of ScienceTo predict Earth’s future, geologists use particle accelerators to understand its past.
To predict Earth’s future, geologists use particle accelerators to understand its past.
Just as the Rosetta Stone has the same message in three different scripts giving scholars insights into ancient languages, so cerium-cobalt-indium5 is offering insights into the interplay between magnetism, superconductivity, and disorder in three classes of unconventional superconductors.
To begin to understand poplar growth, a possible bioenergy crop, scientists at North Carolina State University built a robust high-throughput pipeline for studying the hierarchy of genetic regulation of wood formation using tissue-specific single cells called protoplasts.
Soil carbon may not be as stable as previously thought. Also, soil microbes exert more direct control on carbon buildup than global climate models represent.
Precipitation is difficult to represent in global climate models. Although most single-column models can reproduce the observed average precipitation reasonably well, there are significant differences in their details. Scientists evaluated several single-column models, providing insights on how to improve models’ representation of convection, which is integral to storm cloud formation.
Climate models calculate a changing mix of clouds and emissions that interact with solar energy. To narrow the broad range of possible answers from a climate model, researchers analyzed the effect of several proven numerical stand-ins for atmospheric processes on the energy flux at the top of the atmosphere. They found that the flux is the main driver of surface temperature change.
Thousands of times a second the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory re-creates the hot quark soup that existed at the dawn of the universe. Particles composed of heavy quarks can help reveal details about the quark-gluon plasma, and by extension, the early universe and the origins of matter.
Experiments on a copper-oxide superconductor reveal nearly static, spatially modulated magnetism. Because static magnetism and superconductivity do not like to coexist in the same material, the superconducting wave function is also likely modulated in space and phase-shifted to minimize overlap, consistent with recent theory. This insight will aid in writing a predictive theory for high-temperature superconductivity.
Metamaterials allow design and use of light-matter interactions at a fundamental level. An efficient terahertz emission from two-dimensional arrays of gold split-ring resonator metamaterials was discovered as a result of excitation by a near-infrared pulsed laser.
A stable bulk material shows the same physics found in graphene, which illuminated the interactions of electron’s orbital motion and its intrinsic magnetic orientation. The new material will be a test ground for theories on how electron interactions in solids shape exotic electron behavior.