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21 March 2022
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Meet the Director is a continuing profile series on the directors of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facilities.
Richard Buttery, a native of the United Kingdom, came to the United States in 2009 to join General Atomics and help plan the future of the DIII-D National Fusion Facility. Now a dual citizen and director of the DIII-D program, his admiration for the facility and his team has grown and grown.
“The DIII-D program is incredibly special,” he reflects while standing in the pit of the device—just inches from where plasmas are shaped and held at temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius. “DIII-D is at the forefront of fusion science and innovation, and the team here is the most dedicated group of people I have ever worked with.”
Read more about how Buttery guides the team at D-IIID, the largest magnetic fusion device in the United States.
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Understanding black holes, and how they become supermassive, could shed light on the evolution of the universe. Physicists at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have recently developed a model to explain the formation of supermassive black holes. The model may also help explain the nature of dark matter. It describes a potential cosmological phase transition early in the universe. |
Physicists at JILA measured the effect called time dilation within general relativity at the smallest scale ever. They showed that two tiny atomic clocks, separated by just a millimeter, tick at different rates. The research, which was supported by DOE’s Quantum System Accelerator, could help show how relativity and gravity interact with quantum mechanics. |
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Western Mexico and the American Southwest receive half of their annual rainfall between July and September due to the monsoon season. A team from the University of California, Berkeley used the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center DOE Office of Science user facility to model this phenomenon. They found that these monsoons form in a fundamentally different way than other monsoons around the world. |
Scientists at DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have played a supporting role in a major step forward in the production of fusion power at the U.K.’s Joint European Torus. The largest and most powerful tokamak fusion facility in current use set an historic record in the production of experimental fusion energy. It produced 59 megajoules for five seconds, more than two and a half times the previous record. |
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Researchers from DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, and the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology have taken an image of the components of an important quasiparticle for the first time. The quasiparticle is an exciton, which is created when light hits a thin film of a semiconductor material. The research could help scientists develop new quantum and information storage technologies. |
Physicists searching for axions – a dark matter candidate – have been looking in the wrong place, according to a simulation of how axions were produced shortly after the Big Bang. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, MIT, and DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found the axion’s mass is potentially more than twice as big as theorists and experimentalists had thought. |
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The Office of Science posted five new highlights between 3/8/22 and 3/21/22.
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To allow detectors to search for signs of neutrinos, scientists need to filter out cosmic “noise.” Researchers from DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory developed a new way to make the signals from neutrinos produced by a particle accelerator stand out against the signals from cosmic rays. The technique will be used on the MicroBooNE detector at the Fermilab Accelerator Complex DOE Office of Science user facility. |
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Popular Science: Why the North American monsoon is unlike any other
The North American monsoon is unusual compared to other monsoons around the world. The article describes the UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab research into how topography affects the monsoons.
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How X-Rays Make Better Batteries
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Switching from vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel to those powered by electricity could vastly lower America’s greenhouse gas emissions. To help our nation reach our clean energy future, researchers supported by the DOE’s Office of Science are working to develop better batteries. Our X-ray light source user facilities are a major tool in this effort. Learn more about how scientists leverage these amazing tools in a Q&A with William Chueh from Stanford University and David Shapiro from Berkeley Lab, who work together to use the Advanced Light Source at DOE’s Berkeley Lab and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Light Source at DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. |
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Video: Fusion Forward – From the Laboratory to Commercial Energy
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Fusion – the same reaction that powers the sun – has the potential to be a game-changing technology to help us achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, protect national security, and enhance America’s technology leadership. Watch our new video - which was featured in a summit hosted by the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy - to find out how decades of public investment, rapid growth in private investment, and major recent scientific advances suggest that now is the time to quickly move toward demonstrating commercial fusion energy. |
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CommUnique provides a review of recent Office of Science Communications and Public Affairs stories and features. This is only a sample of our recent work promoting research done at universities, national labs, and user facilities throughout the country.
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