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Category: Uncategorized

Mapping a Mystery: New Instrument will Drill Down on Dark Energy Details

Photo - Kitt Peak National Observatory at dusk. DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, is housed within the Mayall Telescope dome (right). (Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab)

Filling in the Nuclear Data Gaps

Photo - Lee Bernstein, who leads the Nuclear Data Group in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division, at the beam line in Cave 0 of the Lab’s 88-Inch Cyclotron. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab)

New Graphene-Based System Could Help Us ‘See’ Electrical Signaling in Heart and Nerve Cells

Image - This diagram shows the setup for an imaging method that mapped electrical signals using a sheet of graphene and an infrared laser. The laser was fired through a prism (lower left) onto a sheet of graphene. An electrode was used to send tiny electrical signals into a liquid solution (in cylinder atop the graphene), and a camera (lower right) was used to capture images mapping out these electrical signals. (Credit: Halleh Balch and Jason Horng/Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley)

Laser R&D Focuses on Next-Gen Particle Collider

Photo - Wim Leemans, director of Berkeley Lab's Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division, chats with graduate students Joost Daniels, left, and Kelly Swanson in the BELLA laser control room. Berkeley Lab’s BELLA Center is the site of a laser plasma wakefield acceleration R&D effort and other laser experiments that could help set the stage for a next-generation particle collider. (Credit: Paul Mueller)

Glowing Crystals Can Detect, Cleanse Contaminated Drinking Water

Scientists Trace ‘Poisoning’ in Chemical Reactions to the Atomic Scale

Image - A scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image showing a type of catalyst called a zeolite that is used to convert ethanol to high-value fuels. The particles measure about 15 microns in length. (Credit: PNNL)

3-D Imaging Technique Maps Migration of DNA-carrying Material at the Center of Cells

Image - This image shows the skeletonized structure of heterochromatin (red represents a thin region while white represents a thick region), a tightly packed form of DNA, surrounding another form of DNA-carrying material known as euchromatin (dark blue represents a thin region and yellow represent the thickest) in a mouse’s mature nerve cell. (Credit: Berkeley Lab, UCSF)

Simulations Show Swirling Rings, Whirlpool-Like Structure in Subatomic ‘Soup’

Image - This hydrodynamic simulation shows the flow patterns, or “vorticity distribution,” from a smoke ring-like swirling fluid around the beam direction of two colliding heavy ions. The simulation provides new insight about the properties of a superhot fluid known as the quark-gluon plasma. (Credit: Berkeley Lab)

Crystal Clear Imaging: Infrared Brings to Light Nanoscale Molecular Arrangement

Image - Infrared light produced by Berkeley Lab's synchrotron (upper left) and a conventional laser (middle left) is combined and focused on the tip of an atomic force microscope (lower right), where it is used to measure nanoscale details in a crystal sample (dark red). (Credit: Berkeley Lab, CU-Boulder)

Planetarium Show Brings ‘Phantom’ Matter to Life

Image - A pioneering dark matter discovery by astronomer Vera Rubin, who is shown in this rendering peering through a telescope, is described in a new planetarium show. (Credit: "Phantom of the Universe")

Construction of World’s Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector Moves Forward

Photo - A cutaway rendering of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) detector that will be installed nearly a mile deep near Lead, S.D. The central detector will be filled with 10 metric tons of purified liquid xenon that produces flashes of light and electrical pulses in particle interactions. An array of detectors, known as photomultiplier tubes, are designed to amplify and measure these particle signals. (Credit: Matt Hoff/Berkeley Lab)

Scientists Find Twisting 3-D Raceway for Electrons in Nanoscale Crystal Slices

Photo - A scanning electron microscope image shows triangular (red) and rectangular samples of a semimetal crystal known as cadmium arsenide. The rectangular sample is about 0.8 microns (thousandths of a millimeter) thick, 3.2 microns tall and 5 microns long. The triangular sample has a base measuring about 2.7 microns. The design of the triangular samples, fabricated at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, proved useful in mapping out the strange electron orbits exhibited by this material when exposed to a magnetic field. (Credit: Nature, 10.1038/nature18276)