A special accelerator being constructed at Berkeley Lab will be used to study the physics of warm dense matter, which occurs in such astrophysical phenomena as the cores of giant planets and dwarf stars. The necessary techniques for producing warm dark matter on Earth are directly applicable to the accelerators and beam physics essential to heavy-ion fusion, a promising approach for electrical power production and long the choice of Berkeley Lab accelerator physicists. This is the second of two features on current research and the road ahead.

Heavy-ion fusion, a special approach to creating fusion for electrical power production, has long been the choice of Berkeley Lab accelerator physicists. Now the near prospect of “burn and gain” at the National Ignition Facility plus a forthcoming National Academies report on inertial confinement fusion energy have spurred new interest in heavy-ion fusion. This is Part I of a two-part overview of current research and the road ahead.

When the universe was only millionths of a second old, quarks moved freely in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons, but soon protons and neutrons and other forms of ordinary matter “froze out” of this quark-matter soup. Now scientists have compared quantum theory and data from the STAR experiment for the first time to map out the energies and temperatures where ordinary matter melts and the quark-gluon plasma freezes.

On May 3, 2011, the 100th birthday of renowned physicist Luis Alvarez, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for his work in particle physics at the Bevatron and known worldwide for his codiscovery that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, was celebrated by the American Physical Society’s Forum on the History of Physics with invited reminiscences from three physicists who worked with him closely during his career at Berkeley Lab: Richard Muller, Moishe Pripstein, and Arthur Rosenfeld.

Antimatter nuclei of helium-4, the heaviest antiparticles ever found, have been created by the STAR experiment at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Eighteen examples of the antihelium particles were detected by STAR’s Time Projection Chamber, designed and built at Berkeley Lab, in debris from a billion high-energy collisions of gold nuclei.

“Tabletop” laser-plasma accelerators like BELLA promise high energies in short spaces. It’s a staggering challenge to model the acceleration of electrons by a laser beam moving through a plasma in 3-D, however, a challenge that until recently has been beyond practical solution by supercomputers. Borrowing a page from Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, Berkeley Lab researchers have perfected a way to accelerate calculations up to a million times faster.

Atoms of antimatter have been trapped and stored for the first time by the ALPHA collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN in Switzerland. Berkeley Lab researchers made key contributions to the effort, including the design of the trap’s crucial component—an octupole magnet—and computer simulations needed to identify real antihydrogen annihilation events against a noisy background.

The world’s foremost experts in ion-beam cancer therapy meet at Oakland’s Claremont Hotel October 26 through 29 to examine the international success of this unique therapy, explore future developments, and ask tough questions – including why this extraordinary medical advance is making great strides in Europe and Asia but is lagging in the country where it was invented and developed – principally at Berkeley Lab.

With support from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division is building a test facility for the superconducting magnets of the future. The Large Dipole Facility will provide a critical research tool for testing potential new materials including high-temperature superconductors. Despite their promise, the new materials pose plenty of problems and challenges.

Beams of protons were brought together in the first focused collisions on Tuesday, March 30, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The world’s record collisions open a new realm of high-energy physics.