A team led by researchers from the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cornell University has characterized a key arrangement of electrons in a high temperature superconductor. The study, published in the October 26, 2015, online edition of Nature Physics, is the first to identify the atomic-scale origins and influences that produce a phenomenon known as an electron density wave in cuprates. The research suggests a possible link between key components of the electron density wave state and the pseudogap phase.

Mattia Checchin, a PhD student at the Illinois Institute of Technology conducting his thesis research at Fermilab, won first prize for his poster on superconducting radio frequency (SRF) accelerator cavity performance at the recent 17th International Conference on Radio Frequency Superconductivity (SRF 2015) in Whistler, Canada.

Physicists in the United Kingdom have built a multi-SQUID device that can operate at 77K, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. According to research published in Applied Physics Letters, the new device outperforms the industry standard niobium/aluminium trilayer single-SQUIDS maintained at 4.2K. "Since our SQUID arrays operate at 77K using liquid nitrogen, they provide a magnetic sensor that is very cost effective, considering that operation of SQUIDs at 4.2K requires the use of liquid helium-4, which is much more expensive and also requires extensive training for its handling," says Boris Chesca, a physicist at Loughborough University and first author on the new paper.

Ames Laboratory scientists almost 20 years ago announced groundbreaking progress in magnetic refrigeration and yet there are still no known commercially available products that use a magnetic cooling system. Magnetic cooling exploits the magnetocaloric effect, a temperature change of a material caused by exposing it to a changing magnetic field, and could reduce by 20 to 30 percent then energy cost of refrigeration. “That’s roughly equivalent to the US import of oil every day, energy-consumption wise,” says Duane Johnson, chief research officer at Ames. “The potential economic and societal impact is enormous, if you think about all the ways in which we use cooling technology.”

Master Bond on October 13 unveiled a new single part adhesive sealant for use in a variety of applications in aerospace, electronic, optical, specialty OEM and related industries. The Master Bond Supreme 10HTF-1 offers cryogenic serviceability from 4K to +400°F and resists an array of chemicals such as water, fuels, acids, bases and many solvents.

A team of Australian scientists has developed an atomic absorption spectrometer that provides a new way to determine Boltzmann’s constant, a number that relates the motion of an individual atom to its temperature. The research, published in Nature Communication contributes to a worldwide scientific effort to redefine the kelvin, the international unit of temperature.

The US Department of Energy made available an estimated $4 million in grants on October 13 with a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for research opportunities associated with its Accelerator R&D Stewardship Program. Research funded under this FOA could lead to advances is High Energy Physics (HEP), but the grants are primarily directed toward industry partners interested in leveraging accelerator technology toward non-HEP applications.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on October 6 awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald in recognition of key contributions each made to experiments demonstrating neutrino oscillations. Physicists struggled for decades prior to Kajita's and McDonald's experiments to explain why up to two-thirds of theoretically calculated neutrinos seemed to be missing from measurements performed on Earth. Kajita and McDonald discovered these neutrinos weren't missing but rather had oscillated and changed identities, a discovery that challenged the Standard Model of Physics.