News Releases

The American Physical Society (APS) has elected two scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory as 2021 APS fellows. The honorees—Kétévi Adiklè Assamagan and Swagato Mukherjee—represent experiments, computational modeling, and educational/outreach efforts in nuclear and particle physics.

Scientists seeking to explore the teeming microcosm of quarks and gluons inside protons and neutrons report new data delivered by particles of light. The light particles, or photons, come directly from interactions of a quark in one proton colliding with a gluon in another at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). By tracking these "direct photons," members of RHIC's PHENIX Collaboration say they are getting a glimpse—albeit a blurry one—of gluons' transverse motion within the building blocks of atomic nuclei.

Scientists studying superconducting qubits identified structural and chemical defects that may be causing quantum information loss—an obstacle to practical quantum computation.

Scientists seeking to unravel the details of how plants produce and accumulate oil have identified a new essential component of the assembly line. They discovered a particular sterol—a molecule related to cholesterol—that plays a key role in the formation of oil droplets. The findings may suggest new ways to engineer the oil content of a variety of plant tissues for potential applications in bioenergy, chemical engineering, and nutrition.

An international collaboration of scientists has taken a significant step toward the realization of a nearly “green” zero-net-carbon technology that will efficiently convert carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, and hydrogen into ethanol, which is useful as a fuel and has many other chemical applications.

Commercially available materials may be a potentially scalable platform for trapping gases for nuclear energy and other applications.

Bilayer graphene with one of the two layers twisted displayed unique resonant electronic behavior. Understanding how electrons move in such 2-D materials could shed light on how to manipulate them for quantum computing and communication.

Scientists studying the biochemistry of plant cell walls have identified an enzyme that could turn woody poplar trees into a source for producing a major industrial chemical. The research, just published in Nature Plants, could lead to a new sustainable pathway for making “p-hydroxybenzoic acid,” a chemical building block currently derived from fossil fuels, in plant biomass.

Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have produced definitive evidence for two physics phenomena predicted more than 80 years ago: that matter/antimatter can be created directly by colliding photons and that a magnetic field can bend polarized light along different paths in a vacuum.

Using DNA, scientists organized bioactive proteins in desired 2D and 3D ordered arrays -- promising for structural biology, biomedicine, and more.