Science Highlights | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

Neon-20 nuclei have an elongated shape like a bowling-pin. Collisions of these nuclei create signals in how particles flow that clarify the role of nuclear geometry.

Using Nuclear Shapes to Study How Particles Flow in Collisions Between Light Ions

Collisions of oxygen and neon nuclei show how nuclear shapes can influence collective particle flow in small systems.

KATRIN scientists test the system of magnets that control the fields inside the spectrometer.

KATRIN Narrows Down the Range of Neutrinos’ Mass

A direct search shows that neutrinos are at least a million times lighter than electrons.

Two nitric oxide molecules are irradiated with an attosecond X-ray pulse and release an electron. This is an example of the photoelectric effect.

Interactions Between X-Rays and Matter Provide Insights into How Electrons Behave in Molecules

By measuring the delay between when a molecule absorbs a photon from an X-ray and emits an electron, scientists gained insight into how electrons interact.

Illustration of an eye with the chemical structure for rhodopsin molecules in front of it

Unveiling the Molecular Mechanism of Vision Using Ultrafast X-ray Pulses

How visual rhodopsin responds to light in one of nature’s fastest reactions. 

Illustration showing a crystal structure, with balls connected by lines and a blue ball increasing in size moving above the structure

Thin Materials and Fat Electrons: A Recipe for New Quantum Phenomena

The 2D material cerium silicon iodide contains the same heavy electrons responsible for heavy fermion physics, something so far seen only in 3D materials.

Drawing illustrates in 2-D how electrical conductivity (red) tends to form in the direction of greater mechanical strain (yellow arrows). This property could enable controlling a material’s thermoelectric capabilities via chemical or mechanical methods.

Hot on the Trail of a Thermoelectric Material with High-Conductivity but Slow Thermal Transfer

A “neutron camera” device reveals how a thermoelectric material maintains an overall crystalline structure despite local dynamic disorder

The nuclear electron capture decay of highly localized beryllium-7 atoms inside a superconducting tunnel junction sensor provides direct access to quantum properties of the neutrino (e) via a precision measurement of the recoiling lithium-7 atom.

Rare Isotopes Shed Light on the Size of a Neutrino Wavepacket

Precise measurement of beryllium-7 nuclear decay recoils directly probes the quantum properties of the neutrino for the first time.

Two synchronized flashes of ultrafast X-rays interact with a molecule. The electrons ionized from the molecule are detected with an energy spectrometer, providing observation of the interaction between the two particles at the attosecond timescale.

Action! Attosecond X-rays Produce Ultrafast Movies

Researchers use an X-ray free-electron laser to film electrons using finely tuned pairs of attosecond flashes.

Drawing of real charged particle tracks from a collision of two uranium nuclei, shown exaggerated in size and flattened by the effects of traveling close to the speed of light, over a sketch of the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

Imaging Nuclear Shapes by Smashing them to Smithereens

Scientists use high-energy heavy ion collisions in a new way to reveal subtleties of nuclear structure with implications for many areas of physics.

The image using Coherent Correlation Imaging shows the areas where the borders of magnetic domains (called domain walls) accumulate over time and thus maps the presence of pinning sites. The image field of view is 700 nanometers.

Watching Magnetic Materials Get Organized in Real Time

A revolutionary Coherent Correlation Imaging method visualizes electronic ordering in magnetic materials and opens a path to new data storage technologies.

A photon (γ) and a jet of other particles emerges from a proton-proton (p-p) collision (left). But in a deuteron (d)-gold nucleus (Au) collision (right), the jet loses energy while the photon is not affected. Neutral pions (π0) are proxies for the jet.

Fresh Direct Evidence for Tiny Drops of Quark-Gluon Plasma

Particles of light from collisions of deuterons with gold ions provide direct evidence that energetic jets get stuck.

In a strange metal (translucent box), electrons (blue marbles) lose their individuality and melt into a featureless, liquid-like stream.

Can Electricity Flow Without Electrons?

Strange metals defy the 60-year-old understanding of electric current as a flow of discrete charges.