In response to a renewed international interest in molten salt reactors, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a novel technique to visualize molten salt intrusion in graphite.
Tag: Neutron
Spallation Neutron Source achieves world-record power to enable more discoveries
The Spallation Neutron Source at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory set a world record when its linear accelerator reached an operating power of 1.55 megawatts, which improves on the facility’s original design capability.
Army strong: Research teams join forces to invent weld wire for tank, infrastructure repair
The U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense teamed up to create a series of weld filler materials that could dramatically improve high-strength steel repair in vehicles, bridges and pipelines. This novel weld wire could help revitalize America’s aging infrastructures, which in 2021 received a C- grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Tulane physicist awarded $8.2 million to precisely measure lifetime of the free neutron
The $8.2 million grant is the largest is the largest ever direct NSF award to Tulane.
Magnetic quantum material broadens platform for probing next-gen information technologies
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron scattering to find the first 2D system to host a spiral spin liquid.
Physicists confront the neutron lifetime puzzle
To solve a long-standing puzzle about how long a neutron can “live” outside an atomic nucleus, physicists entertained a wild but testable theory positing the existence of a right-handed version of our left-handed universe.
‘No cost’ way to improve neutron scattering resolution by 500 percent
Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists developed a computational technique that improves the resolution of neutron instruments by 500 percent. This solution comes at virtually no cost since it requires no additional hardware and uses open source software.
New IceCube detection proves 60-year-old theory
Normally, electron antineutrino would zip right through the Earth at the speed of light as if it weren’t even there. But this particle just so happened to smash into an electron deep inside the South Pole’s glacial ice, and was caught by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. This enabled IceCube to make the first ever detection of a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted 60 years ago by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow.
Welcome to Neutrino Alley: Q&A with ORNL’s Marcel Demarteau
Marcel Demarteau is director of the Physics Division at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Looking skin deep at the growth of neutron stars
Researchers leveraged data from nuclear scattering experiments to make stringent constraints on how neutrons and protons arrange themselves in the nucleus. Their predictions are tightly connected to how large neutron stars grow and what elements are likely synthesized in neutron star mergers.
The Mystery of the Neutron Lifetime
When scientists use two different techniques to measure the neutron lifetime, they get two different results. While it may be experimental uncertainties, it may also be a sign of new physics. With the Department of Energy’s support, scientists are working to figure out why this discrepancy exists.