Brookhaven Lab

Building a ladder with golden rungs sounds like a pricey project, right? That’s probably why we restrict these construction projects to the nanoscale.

This ribbon-shaped molecular structure is actually composed of nanoscale gold rods linked together by strands of synthetic DNA. The coolest part? This thing built itself. Brookhaven researchers discovered an entirely new nano-mechanism in which the DNA actually directs the construction, acting as a kind of intelligent glue.

The research could lead to new nanomaterials, custom-designed and self-assembled to scientists’ specifications. You know, if gold ribbons strung together with DNA isn’t enough for you.

Bring on the sunshine! April showers are behind us (we hope) and the sun is shining a little longer each day here in the northern hemisphere. That means the 200-acre Long Island Solar Farm (LISF) at Brookhaven Lab is producing increasing amounts of renewable energy for Long Islanders and data for our researchers.

The 32-megawatt solar array—containing 164,312 photovoltaic panels—provides energy to power 4,500 local homes, but we’re also using it to advance solar forecasting, study the potential impact on local wildlife, and enhance our ability to integrate renewable energy sources into the grid. 

Check out this update on LISF’s first year of operation from Pat Looney, who leads Brookhaven Lab’s Sustainable Energy Technologies Department. Where else are you gonna find box turtles, huckleberries, and 54,000 megawatt-hours of solar energy?

No big deal, we’re just moving this 50-foot-wide physics experiment over 3,200 miles of land, sea, and river. Sometimes understanding the fabric of the universe requires a very technical and very long journey.

The experiment is called Muon g-2 (pronounced gee-minus-two), and will study the properties of muons — tiny subatomic particles that exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second. The core of the experiment is the massive machine built at Brookhaven in the 1990s (assembled above), and the circular electromagnet made of steel and aluminum filled with superconducting cable is its centerpiece.

Our friends at Fermilab are giving this instrument a second life. They can produce a more pure and energetic muon beam than we could back in the day, so they can explore particle puzzles with even greater precision. But we can’t take that giant ring apart, so we have to move the whole thing very, very carefully.

This massive move includes a custom-built suspension system, slowly rolling along multiple lanes of highway (watch the animation!), traveling by barge around the tip of Florida, and then floating up the Mississippi River before arriving in Illinois. 

We’ve had some great coverage from the media, including local outlets that will see this big ring float or drive by. Our favorite headline has to be this from CleanTechnica: Honk If You Love Muons.

These melting rainbows represent the ultra-hot — think 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun — dynamics of gold ions smashed together at the speed of light. We call it quark-gluon plasma, you can call it a hot mess.

In this little GIF, you can see the fluid dynamics of this perfect primordial liquid as it forms inside our atom smasher. At the speed and temperature achieved inside our Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the protons and neutrons that make up the matter of gold ions actually ‘melt’ and free the quarks and gluons inside them to form this soupy plasma.

RHIC physicist Björn Schenke created this simulation of the temperatures within the collision, where red represents quark-gluon plasma hotter than 5 million degrees Fahrenheit, while blue is just over 2.7 million degrees Fahrenheit.

This crazy-hot liquid is thought to have existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang, before it cooled and condensed to form the particles that make up all the matter in the universe, from individual atoms to stars, and even the stuff that makes up all of us. Pretty cool, eh? Well, actually, pretty hot.

Nothing to see here. Just an instrument that reveals the building blocks of matter in all their itty-bitty glory.

This is a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), and just past the polished glass of that steel-rimmed window, we exploit a little quantum trickery to capture images of individual atoms. Who doesn’t want to see photography on the Ångstrom scale — that’s one ten-billionth of a meter — that could one day change the world?

Quantum tunneling, which is at least as cool as it sounds, makes this possible. Imagine an STM as a record player, but with a nanoscale needle that floats just above a surface. As that needle moves, electrons actually flow between each of the material’s atoms and the needle, creating an information-laden bridge — this is our quantum tunnel. Measuring that electron activity in turn reveals atomic details, and sophisticated computer programs convert them into images.

Even better, the scientists don’t just see the atoms — they can manipulate them, giving atomic-scale tattoos with the STM needle. Advancing these techniques could revolutionize the way we read and write digital information, ramping up speed while radically shrinking devices.

Not cool enough? Well, maybe you missed the world’s most impossibly tiny motion picture: A Boy and His Atom. IBM scientists made this charming film using an STM, and those are genuine atoms in the starring roles.

darkenergydetectives:

Welcome to the Darkness

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Our friends at the Dark Energy Survey are Tumbling some of their most spectacular images, and man, are they stunning. 

The Dark Energy Survey will use an enormous 570-megapixel camera mounted to a 4-meter telescope high in the Chilean Andes to capture hundreds of millions of galaxies and thousands of supernovae over the next five years. The scientists working on this project will be able to better understand dark energy, the mysterious force that is causing our universe to expand faster and faster.

It’s an exciting project, and it’s even better now that they’re on Tumblr. Welcome, dark energy detectives!

Big science construction sites can look quite a bit like movie sets, but that’s no spaceship or strange submarine — it’s an electrostatic ion beam producer. Okay, that may actually sound even more like fiction.

This photo was taken in 1967 during the assembly of our Tandem van de Graaff accelerator facility — you know, for making ions. The completed instrument is still in operation, providing the electron-stripped atoms for some of the experiments at our Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

Beyond its role in smashing atoms, the Tandem helps NASA engineers test the vulnerability of electronics against the perils of deep space radiation. The beams at the Tandem actually revealed a glitch in the radio system of the Mars Pathfinder caused by simulated space ions hitting the radio components.

Scientists devised a clever trick to overcome the problem, which will sound familiar if you’ve ever called an IT guy: they just switched the Pathfinder power source off and back on again, and the sensitive transistors were back to working as usual. Getting the Mars Pathfinder on track to the Red Planet meant installing an automatic switch to cycle power to the pioneering rover on and off during flight.

Oh, infrared heating furnace. You glow so good.

A lot of the materials we make here at Brookhaven are too small and too precise for traditional tools — good luck trying to hammer atoms into place or screw nanoscale films together. So sometimes we don’t build materials, we grow them. 

Case in point: that glowing chamber above is used to grow superconducting crystals. The infrared image furnace focuses infrared light onto a rod, melting it at temperatures of about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Under just the right conditions, that liquefied material recrystallizes as a single uniform structure. One of our physicists, Genda Gu, actually pioneered techniques that grow some of the largest single-crystal high-temperature superconductors in the world.

The clincher is that these sensitive crystals aren’t in a hurry to take shape. The materials grown by those gold-lined instruments typically take a month to form.

Sunshine, water, and lasers—who could ask for a better combination?

Brookhaven’s Dmitry Polyansky is examining a vial containing a specialized catalyst designed to help convert solar energy into fuel.

Producing clean-burning hydrogen fuel from just sunlight and water requires custom-built catalysts for water oxidation—the part of the water-splitting process that generates oxygen atoms. A tiny amount of the solid catalyst, developed in collaboration with the University of Houston, dissolves and turns the water that lovely shade of blue. 

The setup behind Polyansky is where he uses lasers to study and later improve the catalytic process in these promising materials.

We can’t tell what’s cooler: making fuel from light and lasers or his awesome “Deal With It” safety glasses. 

Brookhaven got a facelift! Our new website shows off all the amazing science that happens at the Lab every day. 

• Curious about what the Universe was like just after the Big Bang? Check out how we explore the makeup of the cosmos at our strong force physics page. 
  
  
• Interested in the effects of climate change or the future of biofuels? That’s one of our major focus areas, explored by our climate, environment, and biosciences researchers.  
  
  
• We’re also solving the nation’s energy challenges by improving the electric grid, increasing grid-scale storage, and developing new sustainable fuels through our energy security initiatives.
  
  
• Wondering why the universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate? Us too. Click through to see how we’re exploring the physics of the universe.
  
  
• Want to know more about how we harness super energetic beams of light to see inside nature’s tiniest structures? Our light sources page delves into the fascinating science of the miniscule. 

And there’s plenty more for you to explore. Go get some science!

Inside this chamber, powerful lasers vaporize solid materials. But this isn’t just wanton destruction – the vaporized particles of iron, tellurium, and selenium are then recollected layer-by-layer to form high-performance superconductors.

This technique—called pulsed-laser deposition—is a bit like collecting the steam as it rises from a pot and letting it condense into a layer nearly as thin as a single atom. The resulting materials can be used in everything from particle accelerators to offshore wind turbines. 

It’s worth going through this extremely difficult process because new superconductors can outdo other energy carriers in a big way. Traditional household circuit breakers usually blow when they hit just 20 amps, but in recent tests, the maximum electric current carried in some of our new superconductors reached more than 1 million amps per square centimeter, which is several hundred times more than copper wires can carry over the same area.

And it’s not just about high current. In hospital MRIs, electricity generates the powerful magnetic fields needed to image the body. If the magnetic tolerance of the superconducting wires inside MRIs is not exceptionally high, the superconductivity shuts down and the entire device fails. Fortunately, the superconducting films grown inside this chamber remained functional even under an intense 30-tesla magnetic field, and most hospital MRIs require just 1-3 tesla.

The short of it? These record-breaking materials work really well.