December 13, 2011
Category: LHC
This guest post was written by Brookhaven Lab physicist Kostas Nikolopoulos.
The ATLAS detector at the LHC
Today's public seminar at CERN, where the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented the preliminary results of their searches for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson with the full dataset collected during 2011, is a landmark for high-energy physics!
The Higgs boson is a still-hypothetical particle postulated in the mid-1960s to complete what is considered the SM of particle interactions. Its role within the SM is to provide other particles with mass. Specifically, the mass of elementary particles is the result of their interaction with the Higgs field. The Higgs boson's properties are defined in the SM, apart from its mass, which is a free parameter of the theory.
Scientists are looking for signs of the Higgs boson by searching for the products of its decay. Two of the most prominent decay channels, or ways the Higgs can decay, are to form two photons or to form a pair of Z bosons, each of which subsequently decays to a pair of leptons (electrons or muons). Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has played and continues to play a key role in the design, construction, and operation of the detectors of the ATLAS experiment that are used to observe electrons and photons (the liquid argon electromagnetic calorimeter) and muons (the muon spectrometer). Major contributions are also made in the data analysis, where Brookhaven scientists have leading roles. BNL also significantly contributes to the trigger -- deciding which events to analyze in detail -- and to computing.
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Posted by Karen McNulty Walsh at 3:46 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 8, 2011
Category: Climate • Environmental science
The Horizon Spirit, a 272-meter cargo ship, makes the round trip between Los Angeles and Hawaii every two weeks.
This is not a story about the latest mega cruise ship, with five swimming pools, 10 restaurants, a rock-climbing wall, and a casino. The vessel we're talking about, the Horizon Spirit, will be outfitted instead with radars, aerosol sampling devices, and other high-tech tools. But even without the fancy umbrella drinks, Ernie Lewis, an atmospheric scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, can't wait to set sail.
Last month, he and several colleagues traveled to California to visit the Spirit, a cargo carrier owned by Horizon Lines that makes regular runs to and from Hawaii. In January, they'll embark on a round-trip voyage to investigate how to get the ship ready for a yearlong mission gathering data to improve climate models, a project funded by DOE's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility.
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December 2, 2011
Category: Instrumentation • Materials science • NSLS
This guest post was written by Mona S. Rowe, science writer for Brookhaven National Laboratory's National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) and NSLS-II.
The quest to authenticate an unknown Rembrandt painting, titled "Old Man with a Beard," hit a dramatic high at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Using an advanced x-ray detector developed at NSLS, scientists found compelling evidence that the famous Dutch master did indeed have his own hand on the painting.
"After doing the experiments at NSLS, I felt that the painting I held in my hands was a genuine Rembrandt," said D. Peter Siddons, physicist with the Photon Sciences Directorate. "We had identified hidden paint layers, which the art historians considered critical to determining attribution."
Siddons explained that art historian Ernst van de Wetering and his colleagues -- University of Delft materials scientist Joris Dik, art restorer Martin Bijl, and University of Antwerp chemist Koen Janssens -- had all been working closely together to answer questions about the painting's attribution and to probe beneath the surface for what they believed was a second image. The Europeans were eager to see what more they could learn using a specialized detector at the New York facility an ocean away.
Rembrandt's "Old Man With a Beard."
Courtesy Rembrandt House.
The detector, named Maia, produced high-definition maps of the spatial distribution of different chemical elements in the painting, at speeds up to 100 times faster than previously achievable. Those results gave scientific support to the declaration of authentication just announced by van de Wetering at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam. Van de Wetering is chair of the Rembrandt Research Project and considered a preeminent authority on Rembrandt.
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November 18, 2011
Category: Construction • Energy
This guest post was written by Pat Looney, chair of the Sustainable Energy Technology Department at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory.
If the sun is shining over Long Island, NY, as you read this article, the Long Island Solar Farm (LISF) is generating enough clean solar energy to power as many as 4,500 homes for the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA).
Construction of the LISF at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) began in the fall of 2010 and officially concluded this month when the array began commercial operation. LIPA hosted a formal commissioning ceremony today, November 18.
LISF is the largest solar power plant in the eastern United States. It sits atop nearly 200 acres at the southeast end of the Laboratory site and consists of 164,000 solar panels that provide LIPA with up to 32 megawatts of alternating current electricity.
Some of the 164,000 solar panels that make up the Long Island Solar Farm.
The LISF was developed by BP Solar and is privately owned, however, BNL will have access to data from the array as a condition of the easement agreement granted by DOE for use of the land. So as the solar panels at LISF are now collecting energy from the sun, researchers at Brookhaven are busy installing sensors and imagers to collect large amounts of data from LISF systems. The data will be used by researchers at the Lab and across the country to address the key issues facing deployment of large-scale solar power plants.
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Posted by Karen McNulty Walsh at 12:30 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 18, 2011
Category: Ecology • Environmental science • Wildlife
This guest post was written by Brookhaven Lab science writing intern Kenrick Vezina, who will be sharing Brookhaven science stories from inside and outside laboratories on site through mid December.
I'm about to enter the well-worn, vegetation-free (read: tick-free) pathway that cuts through the forest near my dorm. I'm about two steps down the trail when I hear a screech from somewhere in the canopy overhead. It's not the full-out war cry of a red-tailed hawk -- the sound we've been trained by television to expect from the beak of every bird of prey -- but it definitely sounds like a raptor. On my honor as a naturalist, I must investigate.
I can't spot the bird, but it continues making furtive, rasping calls, as though taunting me to step off the trail to find it. It's moving further into the woods. I look at the edge of the forest. White-tailed deer have eliminated most of the undergrowth, but there's still enough low vegetation to make a haven for ticks. I shouldn't.
Still, I think, I'll be careful -- just a few steps, and I'll check myself for any unwanted hangers-on in just a moment.
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Posted by Karen McNulty Walsh at 3:52 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 11, 2011
Category: Chemistry • Energy • Instrumentation • Materials science • NSLS
Jason Graetz, left, and Jiajun Chen at NSLS beamline X14A with their transparent reactor for viewing chemistry in real time.
Here's a recipe for basic chemistry: Mix a bunch of stuff in a reaction vessel and see what happens. Only you don't really
see the action taking place -- unless you have some way to visualize the molecular magic.
Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed just such a technique: They've fabricated a transparent chemical reactor vessel that allows x-rays to pass through and capture the chemical changes as they take place.
They recently used this real-time reaction monitoring setup to study the synthesis of lithium iron phosphate and pinpoint the best conditions for producing a defect-free material for rechargeable batteries.
Jason Graetz, a materials scientist and leader of Brookhaven's energy storage group, explains the benefits this way:
Generally we make battery materials in a stainless steel reactor. There's no window, no way to see the reaction -- we just see what goes in and what comes out. So we designed a reactor made out of a glass capillary and, using synchrotron x-ray diffraction, we can not only probe the precursors -- the initial parts of the reaction -- but we can also track what happens as the reaction takes place.
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October 3, 2011
Category: CFN • Energy • Materials science • NSLS • Nanoscience
The following guest post was written by Wei-Qiang Han, a materials scientist working at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials.
Wei-Qiang Han
With gasoline prices still hovering near $4 per gallon, scientists at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) are helping to develop electric vehicles capable of driving hundreds of miles on a single charge. A new compound of five tin atoms and one iron atom (FeSn5) created at the CFN is another development along the road to higher capacity lithium-ion batteries for those vehicles of the future.
Compared to other types of rechargeable batteries, lithium-ion batteries weigh less, can store more electricity for longer periods of time, and can handle more cycles of use and recharging. They are used in some electric cars today, but are not yet powerful enough to compete with cars that can travel 300-400 miles on a single tank of gasoline.
Lithium-ion batteries provide energy as electricity flows from an anode to the device being powered and then back to the battery's cathode. One way researchers compare batteries with different components is by examining theoretical capacities -- how much charge a battery can store theoretically in ideal conditions, and practical capacities -- how much charge a battery can store in real-world conditions that are more similar to everyday use.
Our team found that the practical capacity for anodes of FeSn5 was 100 percent higher than the ideal capacity for anodes used in conventional lithium-ion batteries.
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Posted by Karen McNulty Walsh at 10:30 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 20, 2011
Category: Ecology • Wildlife
This guest post was written by Brookhaven Lab science writing intern Kenrick Vezina, who joined our team this month and will be sharing Brookhaven science stories from inside and outside laboratories on site through mid December.
On Saturday, September 10, I rode into Brookhaven National Laboratory for the first time. Within two hours, I was watching a handful of white-tailed deer on a strip of grass near the Princeton Avenue gate.
I'm a new intern in the Lab's Media & Communications Office, fresh from MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, here to report on all of the fascinating physics, chemistry, and energy research taking place on the Lab's 5,300-acre site.
Groundhogs have a variety of common names, including woodchuck, land-beaver, and my personal favorite: whistle-pig. Their burrows are often co-opted by other species, such as red foxes, as den sites.
But with my scientific background in zoology and wildlife biology, I'm also interested in the wide range of ecology and natural history that can be found here without ever stepping foot inside a lab.
Since that first day, I've seen groundhogs (also known as woodchucks), gray squirrels, turkeys, more deer, blue jays, robins, geese (so many geese), and a mouse. I've heard a handful of birds singing that I don't recognize off-hand. Not to mention the many insects and other invertebrates which defy quick and easy identification.
I'd heard from my friend and colleague (and former intern) Emily Ruppel that BNL is chock-a-block full of wildlife. One time I asked her if I would enjoy living at Brookhaven. "There are turkeys outside my window," was her response. Yet I am still impressed by how many animals there are wandering around campus.
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Posted by Karen McNulty Walsh at 12:03 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 15, 2011
Category: Daya Bay • Neutrinos
This guest post is by Brookhaven Lab physicist Steve Kettell, the Chief Scientist for the U.S. Daya Bay Neutrino Project in southern China. Kettell received his Ph.D. in 1990 from Yale University and is the leader of Brookhaven's Electronic Detector Group.
Steve Kettell
Neutrinos are downright weird!
Produced in prodigious numbers in the sun, supernovae, nuclear reactors and particle accelerators, neutrinos are extremely hard to detect because they hardly interact with other material at all.
If we think about photons from the sun hitting blacktop during the summer, it is quite obvious that they interact and that their energy is absorbed by the blacktop (making it hot to the touch).
But even though 10s of billions of neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of that blacktop per second, most of them do not interact. In fact most pass through the Earth and through much of the universe without interacting with anything.
In order to study these mysterious particles, we need large detectors, and we have to reduce backgrounds from cosmic rays by placing those detectors deep underground.
The two antineutrino detectors in Daya Bay Hall #1, shown here prior to the pool being filled with ultrapure water. The pool is lined with photomultiplier tubes to track any "stiff" (highly energetic) cosmic rays that make it all the way through the overlying rock. (Courtesy of Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Under a mountain in southern China, a new experiment is trying to answer key questions about neutrinos and their impact on the world around us. The Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment started taking data this month, recording interactions of antineutrinos, a neutrino's counterpart with the same mass and opposite spin, as they travel away from powerful reactors of the China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group.
But before I explain Daya Bay in more detail, let me first provide a little background.
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Posted by Kendra Snyder at 9:09 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
