Separated by an ocean and more than a decade, innovative experiments with 31 tin isotopes having either a surplus or shortage of neutrons show how neutrons influence nuclear stability and element formation. The experiments, conducted between 2002 and 2012 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and more recently at CERN, provide knowledge that impacts nuclear energy and national security applications.
The earlier, influential ORNL measurements contributed to the American Physical Society naming ORNL’s Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility a historic physics site in 2016. Several resulting publications by ORNL scientists and collaborators examined nuclear energy transitions of isotopes of tin and its neighbors and established the “doubly-magic” nature of tin-132 —stability resulting from full outer shells of both protons and neutrons.
Recent laser spectroscopy measurements at CERN’s ISOLDE facility by a team of scientists, including Alfredo Galindo-Uribarri of ORNL, combined with ORNL’s earlier Holifield results, have helped physicists understand how nuclear properties change across isotopes. The results, which help theoretical physicists improve models, are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Helion has achieved a significant milestone in fusion energy by successfully demonstrating deuterium-tritium fusion with plasma temperatures reaching 150 million degrees Celsius.
## Questions to inspire discussion.
Fusion Performance Achievements.
🔥 Q: What fusion performance records did Helion’s Polaris achieve?
A: Polaris became the first privately funded fusion machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion while reaching plasma temperatures exceeding 150 million degrees Celsius, proving the ability to compress and hold fusion plasma for more pressure, more heat, and more fusion.
Operational Execution.
Harnessing the power of the sun holds the promise of providing future societies with energy abundance. To make this a reality, fusion researchers need to address many technological challenges. For example, fusion reactions occur within a superheated state of matter, called plasma, which can form unstable structures that reduce the efficiency of those reactions.
Characterizing different instabilities could help researchers prevent or make use of them. One particular instability, known as current filamentation, is also relevant to understanding astrophysical phenomena.
Now, for the first time, a team led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory imaged how the current filamentation instability evolves in real time in high-density plasma.
Keeping high-power particle accelerators at peak performance requires advanced and precise control systems. For example, the primary research machine at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility features hundreds of fine-tuned components that accelerate electrons to 99.999% the speed of light.
The electrons get this boost from radiofrequency waves within a series of resonant structures known as cavities, which become superconducting at temperatures colder than deep space.
These cavities form the backbone of Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), a unique DOE Office of Science user facility supporting the research of more than 1,650 nuclear physicists from around the globe. CEBAF also holds the distinction of being the world’s first large-scale installation and application of this superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) technology.
Questions to inspire discussion AI Model Performance & Capabilities.
🤖 Q: How does Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 compare to GPT-5.2 in performance?
A: Opus 4.6 outperforms GPT-5.2 by 144 ELO points while handling 1M tokens, and is now in production with recursive self-improvement capabilities that allow it to rewrite its entire tech stack.
🔧 Q: What real-world task demonstrates Opus 4.6’s agent swarm capabilities?
A: An agent swarm created a C compiler in Rust for multiple architectures in weeks for **$20K, a task that would take humans decades, demonstrating AI’s ability to collapse timelines and costs.
🐛 Q: How effective is Opus 4.6 at finding security vulnerabilities?
Researchers have designed and demonstrated an ultraviolet laser that removes a major bottleneck in the development of a nuclear clock.
Whereas ordinary atomic clocks keep time using transitions of electrons in atoms, a prospective nuclear clock would harness a transition between states of the nucleus. Compared with electronic transitions, nuclear ones are much less sensitive to environmental disturbances, which would potentially give nuclear clocks unprecedented precision and stability. Such devices could improve GPS systems and enable more sensitive probes of fundamental physics. The main hurdle has been that nuclear transitions are extremely difficult to drive controllably using existing laser technology. Now Qi Xiao at Tsinghua University in China and colleagues have proposed and realized an intense single-frequency ultraviolet laser that can achieve such driving for thorium-229 nuclei [1, 2]. Beyond timekeeping, the team’s laser platform could find uses across quantum information science, condensed-matter physics, and high-resolution spectroscopy.
For most nuclear transitions, the energy difference between the two states lies in the kilo-electron-volt to mega-electron-volt range. Consequently, such transitions are inaccessible to today’s high-precision lasers, which can deliver photons of typically a few electron volts in energy. A long-known exception is the transition between the ground state and first excited state of thorium-229 nuclei. Indirect measurements over the past 50 years have gradually pinned down that transition’s energy difference to only about 8.4 eV. As a result, this transition is being actively investigated as a candidate for developing a nuclear clock.
NASA has advanced plans for a 500-kilowatt (kW) lunar nuclear reactor to power astronauts, Moon bases and deep space missions by 2030.
A team of physicists from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with collaborators, has identified the dominant physical mechanism responsible for energy release in the nuclear isomer molybdenum-93m (Mo-93m). Using high-precision experiments, the researchers showed that inelastic nuclear scattering—rather than the long-hypothesized nuclear excitation by electron capture (NEEC)—is the primary driver of isomer depletion under their experimental conditions.
The findings, published in Physical Review Letters on February 6, provide crucial experimental evidence concerning a long-debated process and shed new light on the controlled release of nuclear energy.
How and why would humans live far from stars? Exploring deep-space habitats, artificial suns, and megastructures.
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