Crucial contributions to Planck’s analysis have also been made by Julian Borrill, the U.S. Planck Team’s computational systems architect, who led a Berkeley Lab group in creating the thousands of simulations run at NERSC upon which the accuracy of the analysis depended. Another related story is at

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Using NERSC supercomputers, scientists at Berkeley Lab’s Computational Cosmology Center generate thousands of simulations to analyze the flood of data from the the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Planck satellite mission, to make the most precise measurement yet of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the remnant radiation from the Big Bang.

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The ratio of isotopes in elements like oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen in meteorites, interplanetary dust and gas, and the sun itself differ from isotope ratios on Earth. In a paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, planetary researchers at UC San Dieto and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory describe how they used LBNL’s Advanced Light Source to study these “mass-independent” effects to explore their origins in the chemical processes of the early solar system.

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Astronomers have long suspected that the explosion of a Type II supernova is only the last in a series of smaller blasts that successively blow off much of the core’s enveloping matter. Despite many such suggestive clues, no causal proof had previously linked precursor “bumps” in brightness to an actual supernova.

On August 25, 2010, the autonomous machine-learning framework (developed by Josh Bloom of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division and Peter Nugent of the Computational Research Division and their colleagues) was combing through recent data from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and came upon a Type IIn supernova, half a billion light years away in the constellation Hercules. Shortly thereafter, Eran Ofek of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science led a search of previous PTF scans of the stellar neighborhood and found its likely precursor, a massive variable star that only 40 days before it went supernova had shed a huge amount of mass.


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An automated supernova hunt is shedding new light on the death sequence of massive stars—specifically, the kind that self-destruct in Type IIn supernova explosions. Digging through the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) data archive housed at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), astronomers have found the first causal evidence that these massive stars shed huge amounts of material in a “penultimate outburst” before final detonation as supernovae.

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by Glenn Roberts Jr.
The search for dark matter runs deep with physicists Blas Cabrera and Bernard Sadoulet, who have chased this mystery far underground and will be recognized for their work as joint recipients of the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. The prize is named for SLAC's founding director, Wolfgang "Pief" Panofsky, and awarded by the American Physical Society.

While some researchers are scanning the heavens with powerful telescopes to detect dark matter or crashing particles together in an effort to create and study its exotic components, Sadoulet, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Cabrera, of Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, have sought the same answers in deep shafts largely shielded from cosmic rays and other unwanted particle "noise."

Their continuing, decades-long Cryogenic Dark Matter Search has brought them to several underground sites in the hunt for direct evidence of theorized weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. If they are proven to exist, WIMPs could help define and explain dark matter, which is thought to make up about 25 percent of the energy density in the universe and is responsible for the formation of structure in the universe...

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Berkeley Lab Researchers Propose a Way to Build the First Space-Time Crystal

Lynn Yarris (510) 486-5375 lcyarris@lbl.gov

Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe. This is the “wow” factor behind a device known as a “space-time crystal,” a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space. However, there are also practical and important scientific reasons for constructing a space-time crystal. With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances...

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DECam, the most powerful sky survey instrument yet built, depends on Berkeley Lab’s red-sensitive astronomical CCDs

Paul Preuss 510-486-6249 paul_preuss@lbl.gov

Early in the morning of September 12 the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, recorded its first images of a southern sky spangled with galaxies. Galaxies up to eight billion light years away were captured on DECam’s focal plane, whose imager consists of 62 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) invented and developed by engineers and physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Berkeley Lab CCDs are noted for their exceptionally high sensitivity to light (quantum efficiency), particularly in the red and infrared regions of the spectrum – a crucial advantage for astronomical CCDs searching for objects at extremely high redshifts. Combining the 570-million-pixel focal plane made of Berkeley Lab CCDs with the light-gathering power of the Blanco telescope’s 4-meter mirror, DECam has unique ability to reach wide and deep into the night sky.

"Berkeley Lab researchers make historic observation of rare Type 1a Supernova.

Exploding stars called Type 1a supernova are ideal for measuring cosmic distance because they are bright enough to spot across the Universe and have relatively the same luminosity everywhere. Although astronomers have many theories about the kinds of star systems involved in these explosions (or progenitor systems), no one has ever directly observed one—until now..."

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Science Underground: Going to Great Depths
The Davis Campus of the Sanford Underground Research Facility -- the Halls of Ivy it’s not.

The word “campus” brings to mind neo-Gothic bell towers and green lawns, not tunnels and caverns almost a mile underground. But that’s what the Davis Campus at the Sanford Underground Research Facility looks like, 4,850 feet down in the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Although SURF has weathered a series of funding ups and downs worthy of the rise and fall of the elevator cages that once took miners, and now scientists, to work in the mine, last year the U.S. Department of Energy successfully assumed sponsorship of the Sanford Lab’s scientific program from the National Science Foundation. DOE will maintain the mine as a home for existing and proposed projects to investigate dark matter, the secrets of the elusive neutrino, and other research that can only be done deep down in the dark...

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