Within the past few weeks, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China has made rapid strides toward completion of the first of three underground experimental halls for collecting data on the last unknown neutrino “mixing angle.” A mini-slide-show looks at the giant underground experiment’s progress.

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.

Physicists in Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division are key members of the international ALPHA Collaboration at CERN in Geneva, which has succeeded in storing a total of 309 antihydrogen atoms, many of them for as long as 1,000 seconds (almost 17 minutes) and some for much longer — more than enough time to perform meaningful scientific experiments on confined anti-atoms.

Graphene, the two-dimensional honeycomb of carbon just one atom thick, is so sensitive to its environment that its remarkable electronic properties can be wrecked by interference from nearby materials. If graphene devices are ever to become practical, finding good substrates on which to mount graphene is critical. A team of researchers from Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have shown why boron nitride may come closest yet to the ideal.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a powerful tool for chemical analysis and, in the form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an indispensable technique for medical diagnosis. But its uses have been limited by the need for strong magnetic fields and big, expensive, superconducting magnets. Now Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have demonstrated that they can do NMR in a zero magnetic field without using any magnets at all.

Long before anyone had actually isolated graphene, a honeycomb lattice of carbon just one atom thick, theorists were predicting that narrow ribbons of graphene would display extraordinary electronic, spintronic, and optical properties along their edges, including semiconductor-like band gaps that sheet graphene lacks. Now Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have used novel techniques to confirm that these nanoribbon “edge states” exist and hold great potential for nanoscale devices.

The biggest 3-D map of the distant universe ever made, showing the distribution of intergalactic clouds of gas by using light from 14,000 galaxy-eating black holes over 10 billion light years away, has been announced by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the largest survey in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The result proves that the technique, never attempted before, can be used to study dark energy in the early universe.

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.

In a three-pronged attack on one of the stubbornest problems in materials sciences, groups from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, SLAC, and Stanford have produced the strongest evidence yet that the mysterious pseudogap, hallmark of high-temperature superconductors, is not a gradual transition to the superconducting phase, as long supposed, but instead is a unique and hitherto unknown phase of matter.