News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Scientists at PPPL have gained new insight into a common type of plasma hiccup that interferes with fusion reactions. These findings could help bring fusion energy closer to reality.

IFJ PAN scientists together with colleagues from the University of Milano (Italy) and other countries confirmed the need to include the three-nucleon interactions in the description of electromagnetic transitions in the 20O atomic nucleus. Vital for validating the modern theoretical calculations of the nuclear structure was the application of state-of-the-art gamma-ray detector systems and the newly developed technique for measurements of femtosecond lifetimes in exotic nuclei produced in heavy-ion deep-inelastic reactions.

One way that scientists seek to bring to Earth the fusion process that powers the stars is trapping plasma within a twisting magnetic coil device shaped like a breakfast cruller. But the device, called a stellarator, must be precisely engineered to prevent heat from escaping the plasma core where it stokes the fusion reactions. Now, PPPL researchers have demonstrated that an advanced computer code could help design stellarators that confine the essential heat more effectively.

Researchers have shown that in polarized proton-proton collisions, the neutral pions in the very forward area of collisions -- where direct interactions involving quarks and gluons are not applicable -- still have a large degree of left-right asymmetry. This finding suggests that the previous consensus regarding the generation of particle in such collisions need to be reevaluated.

Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and General Atomics have demonstrated a method for stabilizing fusion plasmas by suppressing edge localized modes (ELMs).

For the first time, data from LHCb, a major physics experiment, will be processed on a farm of GPUs. This solution is not only much cheaper, but it will help decrease the cluster size and process data at speeds up to 40 Tbit/s. The research paper has been published in Computing and Software for Big Science. https://cds.cern.ch/record/2717938/files/LHCB-TDR-021.pdf

Light exerts a certain amount of pressure onto a body: sun sails could thus power space probes in the future. However, when light particles (photons) hit an individual molecule and knock out an electron, the molecule flies toward the light source. Atomic physicists at Goethe University have now observed this for the first time, confirming a 90 year-old theory.