What’s shaking?
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, we’re especially interested in the answer to the last question. Making sure the world is safe from nuclear proliferation means we need to monitor the globe for nefarious activity.
As you can imagine, a bad actor who wants to hide a nuclear test isn’t going to volunteer a lot of information regarding its whereabouts. That’s where nuclear explosion signatures come in. (Full Story)
Decades of research bring quantum dots to brink of widespread use
The tiny specs of matter called quantum dots can be tuned to emit light, LANL photo.
A new article in Science magazine gives an overview of almost three decades of research into colloidal quantum dots, assesses the technological progress for these nanometer-sized specs of semiconductor matter, and weighs the remaining challenges on the path to widespread commercialization for this promising technology with applications in everything from TVs to highly efficient sunlight collectors.
"Thirty years ago, these structures were just a subject of scientific curiosity studied by a small group of enthusiasts. Over the years, quantum dots have become industrial-grade materials exploited in a range of traditional and emerging technologies, some of which have already found their way into commercial markets," said Victor I. Klimov, a coauthor of the paper and leader of the team conducting quantum dot research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)
Also from Science Daily
What does the edge of the solar system look like?
Outer heliosphere graphic from NASA.
Earth is the sixth planet from the edge of the solar system, meaning we're none too near this cold and inhospitable frontier. But we've sent out various spacecraft over the years, so do we have any idea what the edge of the solar system looks like?
The answer is yes, but it's a work in progress. One of the latest developments, a 3D map of the solar system's edge that took 13 years to create, revealed a few more secrets about this mysterious boundary, called the outer heliosphere.
The outer heliosphere marks the region of space where the solar wind, or the stream of charged particles emitted from the sun, is "deflected and draped back" by the interstellar radiation that permeates the empty space beyond the solar system, said Dan Reisenfeld, a space science researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and head of the team that conducted the research on the 3D map. (Full Story)
Neutrons cluster in nuclear reactors
Neutron clustering measurements at the Walthousen Reactor Critical Facility at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RPI photo.
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory developed a neutron detector capable of making such observations. This detector, known as Nomad, has an excellent time resolution and can therefore measure how neutrons are spatially distributed within a small reactor at a given time.
In the latest work at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Reactor Critical Facility, data from the Nomad system showed that when reactor fuel undergoes fission, the results are far from uniform. While some fission events go on to produce long “lineages” of neutrons, others quickly die off. This lack of uniformity means that energy is produced asymmetrically within the reactor, the researchers explain. (Full Story)
Quantum metasurfaces manipulate free photons
A metasurface with all-optical modulation of the refractive index, LANL graphic.
A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory proposes that modulated quantum metasurfaces can control all properties of photonic qubits. According to the team, such a breakthrough would affect the fields of quantum information, communications, sensing, imaging, and energy and momentum harvesting.
“People have studied classical metasurfaces for a long time,” said Diego Dalvit of the Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems group in the laboratory’s Theoretical Division. “But we came up with this new idea, which was to modulate in time and space the optical properties of a quantum metasurface that allow us to manipulate, on demand, all degrees of freedom of a single photon.” (Full Story)
David Chavez selected Fellow of the American Chemical Society
David Chavez, LANL photo.
David Chavez, deputy group leader of the High Explosives Science and Technology group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been selected as a member of the 2021 class of Fellows of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
Chavez is recognized by the ACS for distinguished contributions to the field of energetic materials chemistry, particularly the development of highly energetic, fundamentally novel, and environmentally friendly materials important to national security. (Full Story)
Also from Chemical & Engineering Newsand the Los Alamos Reporter
Travis Sjostrom selected for prestigious John Dawson Award from American Physical Society
Travis Sjostrom, LANL photo.
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Travis Sjostrom has been selected for a 2021 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society (APS). Sjostrom is one of seven scientists to receive the national award this year.
“It is such an honor for me,” Sjostrom said. “It is rewarding to see this field of theoretical research in warm dense matter, which has had many contributors in recent years and is an active research area, recognized by the award.” (Full Story)
Los Alamos National Laboratory welcomes NGD Systems to Efficient Mission Centric Computing Consortium
As the HPC community enters an era in which computation can be offloaded to storage devices, it is important to explore the mechanisms for using and programming these processing offloads. To this end, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and NGD Systems are partnering through Los Alamos’ Efficient Mission Centric Computing Consortium (EMC3) to explore scalable computational storage offloads for ultrascale High Performance Computing (HPC) simulation environments.
“Computational storage devices become a key source of acceleration when we are able to directly interpret the data within the storage device,” said Brad Settlemyer, senior scientist in Los Alamos’ HPC Design Group. (Full Story)
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