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Breaking barriers: How a fresh perspective helped solve challenges in nuclear safeguards

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Banks of computer screens stacked two and three high line the walls. The screens are covered with numbers and graphs that are unintelligible to an untrained eye. But they tell a story to the operators staffing the particle accelerator control room. The numbers describe how the accelerator is speeding up tiny particles to smash into targets or other particles.

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The trace anomaly is one of the quantities that encodes the energy and momentum of particles built from quarks. Scientists believe the trace anomaly is crucial for keeping quarks bonded in subatomic particles. In this study, scientists calculated the trace anomaly for nucleons and pions. The calculations show that in the pion, the mass distribution is similar to the charge distribution of the neutron and in the nucleon, the mass distribution is similar to the charge distribution of the proton.

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How to keep stray radiation from 鈥渟horting鈥� superconducting qubits; a pair of studies shows where ionizing radiation is lurking and how to banish it.

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So-called 鈥淴YZ states鈥� defy the standard picture of particle behavior and have given rise to several attempts to understand their nature.

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New 2024 American Physical Society Fellow Jozef Dudek is pursuing theoretical descriptions of exotic hadrons, a yet-untallied group of short-lived subatomic cousins of the proton and neutron, those more familiar atomic building blocks.

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Nuclear physics theorists have demonstrated that complex calculations run on supercomputers can accurately predict the distribution of electric charges in mesons, particles made of a quark and an antiquark. The calculations also help validate a method that will be used to make predictions for and analyze data from high-energy experiments at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

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Scientists have demonstrated a new way to use high-energy particle smashups at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to reveal subtle details about the shapes of atomic nuclei. The method is complementary to lower energy techniques for determining nuclear structure. It will add depth to scientists鈥� understanding of the nuclei that make up the bulk of visible matter.

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The new Belle II experiment recently made a world-leading measurement of the lifetime of a particular charmed baryon, a particle that is produced and decays very quickly under very high energy levels similar to the universe shortly after the Big Bang. This demonstrates the experiment鈥檚 ability to make the extremely precise measurements of the sort needed to discover physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

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Researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle, or UW, and Los Alamos National Laboratory used the Summit supercomputer at the Department of Energy鈥檚 Oak Ridge National Laboratory to answer one of fission鈥檚 biggest questions: What exactly happens during the nucleus鈥檚 鈥渘eck rupture鈥� as it splits in two?

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Jefferson Lab鈥檚 Experimental Physics Software and Computing Infrastructure (EPSCI) group develops centralized computing software that can be shared by any of the lab鈥檚 experimental halls and used for future projects.

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This year, the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility celebrates the 40th anniversary of its founding to probe the secrets of the subatomic universe. And for 39 of those years, esteemed physicist Volker D. Burkert has been an important part of its mission. Now, Burkert is being honored for his contributions to advancements in experimental physics with the prestigious Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics. The citation reads: 鈥淔or exemplary leadership in the development of high-performance instrumentation for large acceptance spectrometers that have enabled breakthroughs in fundamental nuclear physics through electroproduction measurements of exclusive processes."

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One of the methods scientists use to study quantum many-body systems is the ab initio approach, but some ab initio methods run into severe computational problems when using realistic interactions. This study introduces wavefunction matching and uses it to perform lattice simulations with realistic interactions. This allows scientists to make calculations that were once impossible.

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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy鈥檚 (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed and tested the world鈥檚 highest voltage polarized electron gun, a key piece of technology needed for building the world鈥檚 first fully polarized Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).

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Researchers at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams reached a new milestone in isotope studies, accelerating a high-power beam of uranium ions to a record 10.4 kilowatts of continuous beam power to a target. The beam enabled scientists to produce and identify three new isotopes, gallium-88, arsenic-93, and selenium-96.

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The Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC) at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory now stores more than 300 petabytes of data. That's far more data than would be needed to store everything written by humankind since the dawn of history 鈥� or, if you prefer your media in video format, all the movies ever created.

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New method for cathode preparation prevents the particle cracking that caused performance decline with cycling of sodium-ion batteries, which offer a cheaper, more abundant alternative to lithium-ion batteries.

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A new stellar process, the intermediate 鈥渋" process, has been proposed to explain new astronomical observations on nucleosynthesis. Scientists recently reported on the measurement of a nuclear reaction that affects the production of lanthanum in the i process. The measurement will help to improve scientific understanding of nucleosynthesis.

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A new toolkit helps researchers build optimal superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavities that form the backbone of advanced particle accelerators. The cavities鈥� cleanliness, shape, and roughness of their inner surfaces contribute to their efficiency. In tests of the toolkit, scientists found that smoother cavities function more efficiently.