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.

“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.

How much do different kinds of neutrinos weigh? And which kind is the heaviest? The answers could explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe, and indeed why there is any matter at all. Clues lie in determining the “mixing angles” at which neutrinos oscillate, one type into another. The Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment, an international collaboration whose U.S. participants are led by Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers, seeks to determine the most elusive mixing angle of them all, called theta one-three. See this interactive photographic tour of the remarkable underground laboratory.

The Large Hadron Collider has completed many successful months of colliding protons (hydrogen ions) at record-breaking energies and now begins four weeks of colliding much more massive lead ions, giving access to different physical phenomena. Berkeley Lab hosts U.S. participation in the ALICE experiment, designed specifically to study the heavy-ion collisions that give rise to a unique phase of matter, the quark-gluon plasma. Berkeley Lab is also a major participant in the ATLAS experiment, one of the other LHC experiments that will study lead-lead collisions.

Ian Hinchliffe of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division is one of four scientists who have won the 2011 J. J. Sakurai Prize in Theoretical Physics from the American Physical Society for their pioneering work a quarter century ago in charting a course for the exploration of physics on the scale of trillions of electron volts (TeVs) using multi-TeV hadron colliders.

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.

The first direct observation of a muon neutrino turning into a tau neutrino at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy confirms that indeed neutrinos do oscillate among “flavors.” Berkeley Lab’s Kevin Lesko says the result “really nails the neutrino oscillation phenomenon.”

The energy bands of complex particles known as plasmarons have been seen for the first time by scientists working with graphene at the Advanced Light Source. Their discovery may hasten the day when these crystalline sheets of carbon just one atom thick can be used to build ultrafast computers and other electronic, photonic, and plasmonic devices on the nanoscale.

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.

The strangest form of antimatter ever seen has been discovered by the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The new particle goes by the jawbreaking name “anti-hyper-triton.” It could not have been found without STAR’s main detector, a time projection chamber invented, designed, and built at Berkeley Lab.