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(PhysOrg.com) -- The focus of Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Photon Injector Experiment, APEX, is an extraordinary electron gun specially designed for the front end of superconducting accelerators. When it’s complete, the APEX gun will be able to produce well-formed bunches of electrons in pulses a few trillionths or even mere quadrillionths of a second long, at rates of up to a million bunches per second.

Jeffrey Grossman says Cambridge has a better climate than California — for carrying out materials science research, that is. That’s why Grossman decided, two years ago, to make the move from the University of California at Berkeley to a position at MIT.

University of California, Berkeley, researchers find evidence of social and psychological support in gossip

Aiming to take "clean" to a whole new level, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland at College Park have teamed up to study how low-temperature plasmas can deactivate potentially dangerous biomolecules left behind by conventional sterilization methods. Using low-temperature plasmas is a promising technique for sterilization and deactivation of surgical instruments and medical devices, but the researchers say its effectiveness isn't fully understood yet.

Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae." Perlmutter heads the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which pioneered the methods used to discover the accelerating expansion of the universe, and he has been a leader in studies to determine the nature of dark energy.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have reconstructed the internal “movie” that plays in a person’s head. [More]

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that it is possible to reduce the minimum voltage necessary to store charge in a capacitor, an achievement that could reduce the power draw and heat generation of today's electronics.

Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers.

By Eric Hand of Nature magazine Can the time-warping ways of Einstein's theory of general relativity be measured by the quantum 'ticking' of an atom? In 2010, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, claimed in Nature that they had used an inexpensive table-top apparatus to show how gravity had altered a fundamental oscillation of two atoms.

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.

Searching for magnetic fields produced by plants may sound as wacky as trying to prove the existence of telekinesis or extrasensory perception, but physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, are seriously looking for biomagnetism in plants using some of the most sensitive magnetic detectors available.

With the sweet scents from the adjacent sake brewery wafting through the air, Elizabeth Norris is busy selling, framing, and restoring intoxicating treats of a different kind. Covering the magnetic walls of her Vintage European Posters shop in Berkeley, Calif., are massive movie posters displaying vivid colors, conveying lots of ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have joined with researchers at Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to mount a three-pronged attack on one of the most obstinate puzzles in materials sciences: what is the pseudogap?

(PhysOrg.com) -- Berkeley researchers find enhanced and controllable magnetization in unique bismuth ferrite films.

(PhysOrg.com) -- As conventional accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider grow ever more vast and expensive, the best hope for the high-energy machines of the future may lie in "tabletop" accelerators like BELLA (the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator), now being built by the LOASIS program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)