Category Physics

Researchers Bjorn Scholz (left) and Grayson Rich (right) with the world’s smallest neutrino detector as it’s being installed along ‘neutrino alley’ at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Credit: Juan Collar/University of Chicago

Physicists play leading role in confirming theory predicted 4 decades ago. In 1974, a Fermilab physicist predicted a new way for ghostly particles called neutrinos to interact with matter. More than four decades later, a UChicago-led team of physicists built the world’s smallest neutrino detector to observe the elusive interaction for the first time. Neutrinos are a challenge to study because their interactions with matter are so rare...

A sample of heat – conducting polymer is tested for thickness in U-M’s Lurie Nanofabrication Facility. Image credit: Joseph Xu, Michigan Engineering

Advanced plastics could usher in lighter, cheaper, more energy-efficient product components, including those used in vehicles, LEDs and computers – if only they were better at dissipating heat. A new technique that can change plastic’s molecular structure to help it cast off heat is a promising step in that direction. Developed by a team of University of Michigan researchers in materials science and mechanical engineering and detailed in a new study published in Science Advances, the process is inexpensive and scalable.

The concept can likely be adapted to a variety of other plastics...

Tracking particle spins reveals that the quark-gluon plasma created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is more swirly than the cores of super-cell tornadoes, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, or any other fluid! Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Swirling soup of matter’s fundamental building blocks spins 10 billion trillion times faster than the most powerful tornado, setting new record for ‘vorticity’. Particle collisions recreating the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that filled the early universe reveal that droplets of this primordial soup swirl far faster than any other fluid...