Latest Neutron Stories

While attempting to solve one mystery about iron oxide-based nanoparticles, a research team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) stumbled upon another one. But once its implications are understood, their discovery* may give nanotechnologists a new and useful tool.The nanoparticles in question are spheres of magnetite so tiny that a few thousand of them lined up would stretch a hair's width, and they have potential uses both as the basis of better data storage...

CHARLOTTE, N.C., May 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Hendrick Construction, Inc. finished a 14,000-square-foot expansion project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, upgrading lab space at one of the world's premier research facilities. The Tennessee project created 13 new labs to support scientific research conducted at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), the world's most powerful pulsed source of neutrons for the study of materials. Scientific understanding of the molecular structure of materials is...

Using neutron beams and atomic-force microscopes, a team of university researchers working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) may have resolved a 10-year-old question about an exotic class of "artificial muscles""”how do they work? Their results* could influence the design of future specialized robotic tools.These "artificial muscles," first demonstrated in the early 1990s, are "ionic polymer metal composite" (IPMC) actuators, a thin...

A researcher at North Carolina State University has helped to develop a new method for describing the binding of protons and neutrons within nuclei. This method may improve scientists' ability to predict and understand astrophysical reactions within stars.When protons and neutrons bind, the process releases energy. This fusion energy is how stars burn. If scientists can determine where these particles are, what they are doing, and how they are binding, they will then be able to more...

Observations of how the youngest-known neutron star has cooled over the past decade are giving astronomers new insights into the interior of these super-dense dead stars. Dr Wynn Ho will present the findings on Thursday April 15th at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow.Dr Ho, of the University of Southampton, and Dr Craig Heinke, of the University of Alberta in Canada, measured the temperature of the neutron star in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant using data obtained by NASA's...

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have pushed the limits of charge breeding and broken a long-standing world record for ionization efficiency of solids.Argonne's Californium Rare Isotope Breeder Upgrade (CARIBU) project has reached 11.9 percent efficiency with metallic particles of rubidium. The previous metal record was 6.5 percent, using potassium, achieved at Laboratory of Subatomic Physics and Cosmology (LPSC) in Grenoble."There have been...

The National Science Foundation has awarded $1.65 million to a project led by Washington University in St. Louis physicist Ken Kelton to build an electrostatic levitation chamber that will be installed at the Spallation Neutron Source at the Oakridge National Laboratory.Using neutrons as a probe, the instrument will allow scientists to watch atoms in a suspended drop of liquid as the drop cools and solidifies.Kelton, PhD, the Arthur Holly Compton Professor in Arts & Sciences and chair of...

Unless you're interested in isotopic labeling, neutrons don't figure much into chemistry. Neutral in charge and a bit bigger than a proton, the neutron neither gives an atom its name nor determines much about its reactivity.But neutrons have some unsung properties that make them useful for investigating matter. Because they are neutral, they can penetrate deeper into a sample than electrons can. Because they have mass and spin, they have a magnetic moment and can probe magnetism. Because they...

An exotic form of carbon has been found to have an extra large nucleus, dwarfing even the nuclei of much heavier elements like copper and zinc, in experiments performed in a particle accelerator in Japan. The discovery is reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters and highlighted with a Viewpoint by Kirby Kemper and Paul Cottle of Florida State University in the February 8 issue of Physics.Carbon-22, which has a nucleus comprised of 16 neutrons and 6 protons, is the heaviest...

Neutron scattering experiments performed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory give strong evidence that, if superconductivity is related to a material's magnetic properties, the same mechanisms are behind both copper-based high-temperature superconductors and the newly discovered iron-based superconductors.The work, published in a recent Nature Physics, was performed at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) along with the ISIS...