News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and Purdue University developed new theories and 3-D simulations to explain what's at work in the mysterious jets of energy and matter beaming from the center of galaxies at nearly the speed of light.

In quantum mechanics particles can behave as waves and take many paths through an experiment. It requires only combinations of pairs of paths, rather than three or more, to determine the probability for a particle to arrive somewhere. Researchers at the universities of Vienna and Tel Aviv have addressed this question for the first time explicitly using the wave interference of large molecules behind various combinations of single, double, and triple slits.

The possibility that neutrinos interact coherently with the nucleus of an atom was first theoretically described in 1974 -- and now physicists report the first observation of such an event.

After more than a year of operation at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the COHERENT experiment, using the world's smallest neutrino detector, has found a big fingerprint of the elusive, electrically neutral particles that interact only weakly with matter. The research, performed at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source and published in the journal Science, provides compelling evidence for a neutrino interaction process predicted by theorists 43 years ago, but never seen.

In 1974, a Fermilab physicist predicted a new way for ghostly particles called neutrinos to interact with matter. More than four decades later, a UChicago-led team of physicists built the world's smallest neutrino detector to observe the elusive interaction for the first time.