Researchers from Canada, California, and Poland have devised a straightforward way to test an intriguing idea about the nature of dark energy and dark matter. A global array of atomic magnetometers – small laboratory devices that can sense minute changes in magnetic fields – could signal when Earth passes through fractures in space known as [...]

MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR’s First Detector Units

Stuart Jay Freedman, a physicist in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division and professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, died November 9, 2012, at the age of 68. Freedman was a world-renowned investigator of fundamental physical laws whose many accomplishments include unique contributions to the study of neutrinos and the weak interaction.

On Wednesday, May 30, the Sanford Underground Research Facility officially opened its Davis Campus, almost a mile deep in the former Homestake gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The event brought over 60 visitors including officials from federal and state government, scientists from universities and national laboratories, and local and national media. Berkeley Lab is the U.S. Department of Energy’s lead institution for this marked advance in underground science.

The LUX Collaboration is searching for the leading candidates for unknown dark matter, weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Located in the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the Black Hills, LUX’s 350 kilograms of liquid xenon and low background make it the most sensitive dark matter detector yet, but with the proposed LUX ZEPLIN Berkeley Lab researchers want to increase that sensitivity by orders of magnitude.

Neutrinos may be even stranger than they seem, if indeed they are the only fermions (particles of matter) that are their own antiparticles. Proof would be a rare form of radioactive decay called neutrinoless double-beta decay, which could only be seen if there’s virtually no background interference. The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR now under construction at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the Black Hills of South Dakota aims to prove these near-perfect conditions can be met.

Some rare cosmic rays pack an astonishing wallop, with energies prodigiously greater than particles in human-made accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider. Their sources are unknown, but gamma-ray bursts are a favored candidate. If so, they should also produce ultra-high-energy neutrinos. Scientists searching for these with IceCube, the giant neutrino telescope at the South Pole to which Berkeley Lab has made key contributions, have found exactly zero. The mystery deepens.

Kenneth Crowe, a widely traveled physicist and a demanding, inspirational teacher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley, died February 1, 2012, at the age of 85.

Clyde Taylor, pioneering scientist and engineer of superconducting magnet technology at Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, died November 16, 2011.

From the planet’s core to its surface, heat enables Earth’s magnetic field, spreads the sea floor, and keeps continents on the move. Much of the heat is “radiogenic,” from the radioactive decay of elements in the crust and mantle, but how much? By measuring neutrinos from deep in the Earth, Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues at Japan’s KamLAND neutrino detector have published the most precise estimate yet of radiogenic heat.