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Category: particle physics – Page 497

What could the UK’s recent investment announcement mean for the future of sustainable energy?
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There are many directions we could go when it comes to the future of sustainable energy—but the UK made a bold move when it announced a huge investment (220 million pounds huge) in a prototype fusion power facility that could be functioning as a commercial power plant by 2040.

So it’s safe to say the race to fusion power is on. Fusion energy could provide us with clean, basically limitless energy.

But the thing is, fusion power isn’t really a reality yet, but does this prototype facility have a shot at making fusion a reality?

Nuclear fusion is what powers stars, including the sun. The ‘fusion’ part refers to the fact that isotopes of extremely light elements like hydrogen, are fusing together at the extremely high temperatures and pressures that exist at the center of stars. Under these conditions, gases like helium and hydrogen actually exist as plasmas.

So how could we possibly recreate what happens inside of stars here on Earth? By replicating those extreme conditions so that we can get the atoms to behave the way we want them to.

Continue reading “The UK Is Racing to Build the World’s First Commercial Fusion Power Plant” | >

Gamma-ray bursts appear without warning and only last a few seconds, so astronomers had to move quickly. Just 50 seconds after satellites spotted the January explosion, telescopes on Earth swiveled to catch a flood of thousands of particles of light.

“These are by far the highest-energy photons ever discovered from a gamma-ray burst,” Elisa Bernardini, a gamma-ray scientist, said in a press release.

Over 300 scientists around the world studied the results; their work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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Data from ESA’s Cluster mission has provided a recording of the eerie “song” that Earth sings when it is hit by a solar storm.

The song comes from that are generated in the Earth’s magnetic field by the collision of the storm. The storm itself is the eruption of electrically charged particles from the sun’s atmosphere.

A team led by Lucile Turc, a former ESA research fellow who is now based at the University of Helsinki, Finland, made the discovery after analyzing data from the Cluster Science Archive. The archive provides access to all data obtained during Cluster’s ongoing mission over almost two decades.

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At almost every frontier in theoretical physics, scientists are struggling to explain what we observe. We don’t know what composes dark matter; we don’t know what’s responsible for dark energy; we don’t know how matter won out over antimatter in the early stages of the Universe. But the strong CP problem is different: it’s a puzzle not because of something we observe, but because of the observed absence of something that’s so thoroughly expected.

Why, in the strong interactions, do particles that decay match exactly the decays of antiparticles in a mirror-image configuration? Why does the neutron not have an electric dipole moment? Many alternative solutions to a new symmetry, such as one of the quarks being massless, are now ruled out. Does nature just exist this way, in defiance of our expectations?

Through the right developments in theoretical and experimental physics, and with a little help from nature, we just might find out.

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Scientists have long theorized that the energy stored in the atomic bonds of nitrogen could one day be a source of clean energy. But coaxing the nitrogen atoms into linking up has been a daunting task. Researchers at Drexel University’s C&J Nyheim Plasma Institute have finally proven that it’s experimentally possible—with some encouragement from a liquid plasma spark.

Reported in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, the production of pure polymeric nitrogen—polynitrogen—is possible by zapping a compound called sodium azide with a jet of plasma in the middle of a super-cooling cloud of liquid nitrogen. The result is six nitrogen atoms bonded together—a compound called ionic, or neutral, nitrogen-six—that is predicted to be an extremely energy-dense material.

“Polynitrogen is being explored for use as a ‘green’ fuel source, for energy storage, or as an explosive,” said Danil Dobrynin, Ph.D., an associated research professor at the Nyheim Institute and lead author of the paper. “Versions of it have been experimentally synthesized—though never in a way that was stable enough to recover to ambient conditions or in pure nitrogen-six form. Our discovery using liquid plasma opens a new avenue for this research that could lead to a stable polynitrogen.”

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The structure that will house one of the largest and most ambitious energy experiments in history is now complete, with engineers working on the ITER Tokamak Building swinging their last pylon into place in readiness for the nuclear fusion reactor’s assembly stage. Nine years in the making, the facility is built to host the type of super-hot high-speed reactions that take place inside the Sun, and hopefully advance our decades-long pursuit of clean and inexhaustible nuclear fusion energy.

In the works since 1985, ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is a type of nuclear fusion reactor known as a tokamak and is a collaborative project involving thousands of scientists and engineers from 35 countries. These donut-shaped devices are designed to accommodate circular streams of plasma consisting of hydrogen atoms, which are compressed using superconducting magnets so that they fuse together and release monumental amounts of energy.

There are key technological challenges to overcome when it comes to tokamak reactors. Chiefly, these center on bringing them up to the required temperatures and keeping the streams of plasma in place long enough for the reactions to take place.

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Excitons are quasiparticles made from the excited state of electrons and—according to research being carried out EPFL—have the potential to boost the energy efficiency of our everyday devices.

It’s a whole new way of thinking about electronics. Excitons—or quasiparticles formed when electrons absorb light—stand to revolutionize the building blocks of circuits. Scientists at EPFL have been studying their extraordinary properties in order to design more energy-efficient electronic systems, and have now found a way to better control excitons moving in semiconductors. Their findings appear today in Nature Nanotechnology.

Quasiparticles are temporary phenomena resulting from the interaction between two particles within solid matter. Excitons are created when an electron absorbs a photon and moves into a higher energy state, leaving behind a hole in its previous energy state (called a “valence band” in band theory). The electron and electron hole are bound together through attractive forces, and the two together form what is called an exciton. Once the electron falls back into the hole, it emits a photon and the exciton ceases to exist.

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The characteristics of a new, iron-containing type of material that is thought to have future applications in nanotechnology and spintronics have been determined at Purdue University.

The native material, a topological , is an unusual type of three-dimensional (3D) system that has the interesting property of not significantly changing its when it changes electronic phases—unlike water, for example, which goes from ice to liquid to steam. More important, the material has an electrically conductive surface but a non-conducting (insulating) core.

However, once iron is introduced into the native material, during a process called doping, certain structural rearrangements and magnetic properties appear which have been found with high-performance computational methods.

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NASA launched the Juno mission to Jupiter on August 5, 2011. After a five-year flight, the spacecraft entered orbit on July 4, 2016.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System, with an equatorial diameter of 142,984 kilometers. It is so large that it could contain all of the other planets within its volume. Since Jupiter rotates in a mere 9.925 hours, its equatorial diameter is more than 9275 kilometers greater than the distance between its poles.

There are radiation belts around Jupiter, similar to the Van Allen radiation belts that surround Earth, except they are thousands of times more powerful. Juno’s electronics are, therefore, enclosed within a titanium shell, so that the energetic particles trapped around Jupiter will not interfere with its systems.

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