High Energy Physics and Computational Science

  People wave Indian flags as a rocket carrying the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh state, India  India could become the first nation to land a spacecraft on the moon’s south pole, days after a Russian probe crashed in the same region – an historic moment for the world’s most populous nation, as it rapidly closes in on milestones set by global space powers. Chandrayaan-3, which means “Mooncraft” in Sanskrit, is scheduled to touch down shortly after 6pm India time (12:30 GMT) on Wednesday near the little-explored lunar south pole. “India reaches for the moon”, The Times of India front-page headline read on Wednesday, with the hoped-for lunar landing dominating local news. “It’s D-Day for moon mission”, The Hindustan Times said. A previous Indian effort failed in 2019, and the latest attempt comes just days after Russia’s first moon mission in almost 50 years, destined for the same region, crashed on the lunar...

  The Standard Model of physics is a theoretical framework that describes fundamental particles, governing how they interact, decay, and transform into each other. It is often regarded as the most accurate theory physicists have to date, and its predictions of a wide range of phenomena are in general agreement with experimental data. However, the Standard Model has its limitations. For example, it describes only three fundamental interactions — electromagnetic, strong and weak — but omits gravity, a huge player in our Universe. In addition, it does not provide any hints as to what dark matter and dark energy are, while the existence of these entities is suggested by numerous astronomical observations. But recently there have been indications that nature is not fully described by the Standard Model, and not only at cosmological scale, but also on the subatomic, on the level of individual elementary particles. Enter the muon The controversy is centered around a tiny particle called a...

  Shun Saito from MIssouri S&T (left) and Andrew Hearin from Argonne (right) are collaborating on an inclusive research project in high energy physics. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.) The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) have been awarded funding for a program that aims to generate insights about the universe while expanding diversity in the high energy physics field. Through the $589,000, three-year grant from DOE’s Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR) initiative, the research team will create a computer modeling framework to map a set of distant galaxies known as emission line galaxies. The grant also supports the participation of students from historically underrepresented groups. Shun Saito, assistant professor of physics at Missouri S&T, is leading the research project with Andrew Hearin, an Argonne physicist, as the DOE national laboratory partne...

  This graphic illustrates a proton moving at nearly the speed of light toward the viewer with its spin aligned along the horizontal direction (large arrow). The two views of concentric circles at the bottom show the spatial distributions of the momentum of up quarks (left) and down quarks (right) within this proton (white is high; violet is low). Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory. Using supercomputers, a collaboration of nuclear theorists has predicted the spatial distributions of charges, momentum, and other properties of “up” and “down” quarks within protons. This is the first study to use a novel theoretical approach to create a high-resolution map of quarks within a proton. Their calculations also showed that the up quark has a more symmetrical distribution and is scattered across a smaller area than the down quark. These variations suggest that up and down quarks may contribute differently to the fundamental features and structure of the proton, including its internal en...

  A team of physicists and geologists at CEA DAM-DIF and Universit´e Paris-Saclay, working with a colleague from ESRF, BP220, F-38043 Grenoble Cedex and another from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, has succeeded in synthesizing a single-crystalline iron in a form that iron has in the Earth's core. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes how they used an experimental approach to synthesize pure single-crystalline ε-iron and possible uses for the material In trying to understand Earth's internal composition, scientists have had to rely mostly on seismological data. Such studies have led scientists to believe that the core is solid and that it is surrounded by liquid. But questions have remained. For example, back in the 1980s, studies revealed that seismic waves travel faster through the Earth when traveling pole to pole versed equator to equator, and no one could explain why. Most theories have suggested it is likely beca...