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Category: particle physics – Page 67

What secrets can Pluto’s moon, Charon, reveal about the formation and evolution of planetary bodies throughout the solar system? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as an international team of researchers led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to conduct the first-time detection of hydrogen peroxide and carbon dioxide on Charon’s surface, which adds further intrigue to this mysterious moon, along with complementing previous discoveries of water ice, ammonia-bearing species, and organic materials, the last of which scientists hypothesize could explain Charon’s gray and red surface colors.

“The advanced observational capabilities of Webb enabled our team to explore the light scattered from Charon’s surface at longer wavelengths than what was previously possible, expanding our understanding of the complexity of this fascinating object,” said Dr. Ian Wong, who is a staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author on the study.

Detecting hydrogen peroxide is significant since it forms from the broken-up oxygen and hydrogen atoms after water ice is exposed to cosmic rays, solar wind, or solar ultraviolet light. This indicates that the Sun’s activity influences surface processes so far away, with Charon being approximately 3.7 billion miles from the Sun. The researchers determined that Charon’s carbon dioxide serves as a light coating on Charon’s water-ice heavy surface. While the surface of Charon was studied in-depth from NASA’s New Horizons mission in 2015, these new findings provide greater understanding of the physics-based processes responsible for Charon’s unique surface features.

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The group’s detector design exploits Cherenkov radiation, a phenomenon in which radiation is emitted when charged particles moving faster than light pass through a particular medium, akin to when crossing the sound barrier. This is also responsible for nuclear reactors’ eerie blue glow and has been used to detect neutrinos in astrophysics laboratories.

The researchers proposed to assemble their device in northeast England and detect antineutrinos from reactors from all over the U.K. as well as in northern France.

One issue, however, is that antineutrinos from the and space can muddle the signal, especially as very distant reactors yield exceedingly small signals—sometimes on the order of a single antineutrino per day.

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On September 29, 1901 Enrico Fermi ForMemRS was born.

On May 11, 1974, National Accelerator Laboratory was given a new name: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The eponym honors famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, whose accomplishments in both theoretical and experimental physics place him among the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

Many visitors to Fermilab reasonably conclude from its name that Enrico Fermi worked at the laboratory, but he never did. In fact, he died in 1954, years before scientists even officially recommended the construction of a U.S. accelerator laboratory in 1963.

In 1938, Fermi won the Nobel Prize for work that eventually led to the first controlled release of nuclear energy. He and his family then left Italy and came to the United States, where he accepted a position at Columbia University. He later moved to the University of Chicago, where he built the first atomic pile in the squash court under the university’s Stagg Field. While there, he continued investigating the nature of particles that make up the nucleus. He was also active in the design of the school’s synchrocyclotron. At the time of its completion, it was one of the most powerful atom smashers in the world.

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Physicists have detected a long-sought particle process that may suggest new forces and particles exist in the universe.

By Clara Moskowitz

Once in a very great while, an ephemeral particle called a kaon arises and then quickly decays away into three other obscure entities. Whether or not this happens in a particular way has very little bearing on most of us, who will go about our lives without knowing either way. But to physicists who have been searching for this arcane process for decades, it matters a lot; finding out how often it happens could reveal hidden aspects of our universe.

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In 2020, the team reported evidence of this rare form of decay being detected by the experiment. Now, after far more collisions, including higher-energy collisions, the team reports a 5-sigma detection, meaning there is a 0.00006 percent chance that the detection is a statistical fluke.

“With this measurement, K+ → π+νṽ becomes the rarest decay established at discovery level – the famous 5 sigma,” Cristina Lazzeroni, Professor in Particle Physics at the University of Birmingham, said in a statement. “This difficult analysis is the result of excellent teamwork, and I am extremely proud of this new result.”

While the decay is rare, as predicted by the Standard Model, it is around 50 percent higher than expected, occurring about 13 times in 100 billion. It is unclear what causes this discrepancy between the Standard Model’s predictions and the results observed, with possible explanations including new particles or new physics, both of which are pretty exciting.

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Battery performance is heavily influenced by the non-uniformity and failure of individual electrode particles. Understanding the reaction mechanisms and failure modes at nanoscale level is key to advancing battery technologies and extending their lifespan. However, capturing real-time electrochemical evolution at this scale remains challenging due to the limitations of existing sensing methods, which lack the necessary spatial resolution and sensitivity.

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Mars was once a very wet planet, as is evident in its surface geological features. Scientists know that over the last 3 billion years, at least some water went deep underground, but what happened to the rest? Now, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) missions are helping unlock that mystery.

“There are only two places water can go. It can freeze into the ground, or the water molecule can break into atoms, and the atoms can escape from the top of the atmosphere into space,” explained study leader John Clarke of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University in Massachusetts. “To understand how much water there was and what happened to it, we need to understand how the atoms escape into space.”

Clarke and his team combined data from Hubble and MAVEN to measure the number and current escape rate of the hydrogen atoms escaping into space. This information allowed them to extrapolate the escape rate backwards through time to understand the history of water on the red planet.

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