Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory Plasma Physics Division demonstrate significant progress in the efficiency and cost effectiveness of light ions in the fast ignition of fusion targets. Light ions such as lithium or carbon are easier to produce technologically and the ion beam properties can be manipulated and tailored best to suit the necessary requirements for fast ignition.
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Feed SubscriptionAnother Higgs rumor reminds us how science is correctly done
(PhysOrg.com) -- With the Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) running smoothly for well over a year now, the excitement surrounding the possibility for the discovery of new physics has generated a few rumors - speculations that have not been published in peer-reviewed journals. The latest came last week, when an anonymous person posted the abstract of a note on Columbia University mathematician Peter Woits blog that claimed an intriguing observation.
Read More »Zeroing in on the elusive green LED
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method for manufacturing green-colored LEDs with greatly enhanced light output.
Read More »Fire ants assemble as a ‘super-organism’ (w/ video)
The ants may go marching one by one, but they end up forming a superstructure of thousands -- and together they can form a raft that stretches the boundaries of the laws of physics, according to new research released today.
Read More »Beetle bling: Researchers discover optical secrets of ‘metallic’ beetles
Costa Rica was once regarded as the poorest of all the colonies of the Spanish Empire, sadly deficient in the silver and gold so coveted by conquistadors. As it turns out, all of the glittering gold and silver those explorers could have ever wanted was there all along, in the country's tropical rainforestsbut in the form of two gloriously lustrous species of beetle.
Read More »Scientists suggest spacetime has no time dimension
(PhysOrg.com) -- The concept of time as a way to measure the duration of events is not only deeply intuitive, it also plays an important role in our mathematical descriptions of physical systems. For instance, we define an objects speed as its displacement per a given time
Read More »Electron ping pong in the nano-world
(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team of researchers succeeded at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics to control and monitor strongly accelerated electrons from nano-spheres with extremely short and intense laser pulses. (Nature Physics, 24
Read More »Rice-born detector finds heaviest antimatter
Physicists at Rice University and their collaborators have detected the antimatter partner of the helium nucleus, antihelium-4. This newly observed particle is the heaviest antimatter particle ever detected.
Read More »Scientists ask: Is the kilo losing weight?
Ensuring a pound of butter is indeed a pound, or a gallon of milk a full gallon, has long been the province of government agencies that deal with weights and measures. But now it seems scientists are having a little trouble with the golf-ball-size piece of metal that is used to set the standard weight for a kilogram, or kilo.
Read More »Antihelium-4: Physicists nab new record for heaviest antimatter
Members of the international STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider -- a particle accelerator used to recreate and study conditions of the early universe at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory -- have detected the antimatter partner of the helium nucleus: antihelium-4.
Read More »Titanium oxide doped with cobalt produces magnetic properties at room temperature
(PhysOrg.com) -- Spintronics also known as magnetoelectronics may replace electronics as the medium of choice for computer memory. The discovery of a mechanism that produces permanent magnets at room temperature, without any external influence, may soon improve the design of spintronic devices. Takumi Ohtsuki from the RIKEN SPring-8 Center, Harima and his colleagues in Japan, made the discovery in a class of material called a dilute ferromagnetic oxide.
Read More »Timid and shy or bold and welcoming, water behaves in unexpected ways on surfaces
It's ubiquitous. It's universal. And it's understoodnot! Water's choices in a given situation often defy scientific predictions.
Read More »Large Hadron Collider sets world record beam intensity
(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.
Read More »Optical microscope without lenses produces high-resolution 3-D images on a chip
(PhysOrg.com) -- UCLA researchers have redefined the concept of a microscope by
Read More »Primordial beryllium could reveal insights into the Big Bang
(PhysOrg.com) -- Some chemical elements appear much more abundantly in nature than others, which is partly due to how the elements originally formed. Scientists know that the light elements (hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and traces of lithium) were produced by fusion in the early Universe. Today, lithium, beryllium, and boron are constantly being produced in cosmic rays, while the heavier elements (up to iron) are formed by fusion in stars.
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