Science Highlights

In cuprate materials, superconductivity competes with magnetic spin and electric charge density wave (CDW) order in the material’s electrons. In some of these materials, strong magnetic interaction causes spin density waves (SDW) and CDWs to lock together to form a stable long-range “stripe state” where the peaks and valleys of the two waves are aligned. This stripe state competes with and interrupts the superconducting phase, but the new research found that short-range CDW can be compatible with superconductivity.

The world’s fastest supercomputer helped researchers simulate synthesizing a material harder and tougher than a diamond — or any other substance on Earth. The study used Frontier to predict the likeliest strategy to synthesize such a material, thought to exist so far only within the interiors of giant exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system.

Scientists recreate the conditions of the early universe in collisions of atoms in particle accelerators. Measuring the resulting particles allows scientists to understand how matter formed. A new calculation determined that as much as 70% of some measured particles are from reactions later than the early universe of quark-gluon plasma.

An important part of physics research is examining why theoretical calculations and experimental results sometimes don’t match. A recent physics experiment on the helium-4 nucleus and how it transitions from its basic energy state to its first excited state found evidence of a disagreement between theory and experiment. Now new calculations of the observed transition found agreement with the recent experimental results.

Flowing liquid lithium over a series of slats could offer an ideal solution for drawing excess heat off of a fusing plasma.

Atomic nuclei vary in shape from prolate to oblate, and these shapes have different moments of inertia, such that it takes different amounts of energy to spin different nuclei. Previous research has suggested that the amount of energy to spin some nuclei ever faster changes unexpectedly due to an anomalous increase in the moment of inertia, possibly because nuclei start to bulge out. New simulations have found instead that the moment of inertia does not change but several competing prolate and oblate shapes emerge that on average appear spherical.

Researchers have found similarities in how concepts of energy, pressure, and confinement apply to atomic nuclei and superconductivity. Specifically, in both hadrons and superconductors, how particles are confined to a specific volume can be described with the same mathematical framework derived from quantum chromodynamics. These dynamics even have similarities to the theories of how the universe expands.