Science Highlights

Physicists know from previous experiments that what happens at the nuclear scale to protons and neutrons also affects their constituent quarks and gluons. A novel new framework has tapped on short-range correlations – brief pairings of protons and neutrons - to decipher the particles’ choreography and reveal this connection.

New studies have found that using louvers at the bottom of a fusion device creates local conditions that can reduce the temperature of the edge plasma, ensuring the plasma is not hot enough to damage the device. Specifically, the louvers allow the hot plasma to “detach” from the walls of the device, spreading out the heat. The work, on the SPARC machine, aids in progress toward fusion energy production.

A team of scientists investigate an exotic, light-induced phase transformation within a material using advanced X-ray and laser capabilities.

Lanthanum strontium manganite (LSMO) is a quantum material that is magnetic and conducts electricity at low temperature but is nonmagnetic and an insulator at room temperature. Researchers discovered that applying voltage to LSMO in its magnetic phase causes the material to split into regions with distinct magnetic properties whose properties depend on the applied voltage. This means that both resistance and magnetism can be tuned in LSMO, creating a new path toward neuromorphic devices.

At extremely high densities, quarks are expected to form pairs, a phenomenon called color superconductivity. The strength of pairing inside a color superconductor is related to the pressure of dense matter such as neutron stars. Researchers used neutron star observations to constrain the limits of neutron star material properties at extremely high densities where matter is a color superconductor.

Researchers used solar energy to convert CO2 into a valuable chemical commodity with a two-step solar-powered process. First, electricity from solar energy combined with electrochemistry converts CO2 to ethylene. The ethylene gas stream that exits this process then feeds directly to a thermal catalytic reactor that uses heat derived from the sun to convert ethylene to butene.

Attractive metal-metal bonding occurs in a variety of molecules made of metallic atoms such as Iridium (Ir). Current theoretical and experimental methods have shown the existence of two isomers for Ir-Ir molecular systems, but researchers have not been able to predict the proportions of these two isomers or how they interact. This research combines ultrafast experimental measurements and numerical simulations to tease out key information about the two isomers in Ir-Ir complexes.