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(PhysOrg.com) -- Accelerator technology has made huge leaps forward, prompting important developments well beyond high energy physics in areas as diverse as energy and the environment, medicine, industry, national security and discovery science. But the capacity to translate accelerator breakthroughs into commercial applications has lagged behind.

Last month, the preparations for the assembly of the NOvA neutrino detector passed a pivotal test in an assembly building at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The world's first x-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), first unveiled in 2009 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto California, has been undergoing testing by group of physicists determined to find out how many of the photons it emits are synchronized and have found, as they describe in their paper in Physical Review Letters, the x-ray radiation that it produces, is the most coherent ever measured.

Two years ago, when I first wrote about accelerator funds, they were something of a curiosity. Give a team of smart engineers enough money—usually between $15,000 and $50,000—to keep them in ramen and air mattresses, mentor them, and then put them in front of investors.

Let's say a driver approaches a red light at 80 kilometers per hour and coasts to slow down, then the light turns green and he or she floors the accelerator. As the car slows down, the transmission automatically downshifts into lower gears, but a sudden command to increase speed reverses that process and the transmission has to find the proper gear for quick acceleration. With new technology introduced in the past couple of years to meet upcoming fuel economy standards , drivers of a small handful of the latest Ford, Chevy, GMC, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi models may feel engine hesitation when they goose the accelerator, which is a source of frustration, at minimum, to many drivers.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists of the CDF collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced the observation of a new particle, the neutral Xi-sub-b (Ξb0). This particle contains three quarks: a strange quark, an up quark and a bottom quark (s-u-b). While its existence was predicted by the Standard Model, the observation of the neutral Xi-sub-b is significant because it strengthens our understanding of how quarks form matter

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Daresbury science park in Britain have offered a glimpse into what might be the future of nuclear energy production by showcasing a scaled down particle accelerator; one, that when combined with others just like it, could produce nuclear energy based on thorium, rather than uranium. Dubbed the Electron Machine with Many Applications (EMMA), the accelerator, a much smaller version of the kind used in physics research, such as the Large Hadron Collider, could be used to provide an accelerated beam necessary for the type of nuclear reaction used in a theoretical thorium plant.

At the Radioactive Isotope Beam Facility (RIBF) of the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator Science in Wako, a research team has measured the time it takes for 38 extremely rare isotopes to decay by half. This is the first study of half-lives for 18 of the isotopes. The data provide a long-awaited test of theoretical predictions of the rate at which these isotopes decay, and will help nuclear physicists to understand a fundamental source of many of the atomic elements and their isotopes

(PhysOrg.com) -- Around midnight this night CERN's Large Hadron Collider set a new world record for beam intensity at a hadron collider when it collided beams with a luminosity of 4.67 x 1032cm-2s-1. This exceeds the previous world record of 4.024 x 1032cm-2s-1, which was set by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron collider in 2010, and marks an important milestone in LHC commissioning.