Nuclear power plants like the twin Daya Bay reactors, yield large amounts of electron antineutrinos -- millions of quadrillions of them every second. | Photo Courtesy of Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Lab have a developed “fingerprints” to match the results of experiments with data from supercomputer simulations that investigates how molecules move and interact. This technology will help researchers tackle scientific challenges in areas like biofuels, drug development, materials design and fundamental biological processes -- all of which require deep understanding of molecular movement.
Jeremy Smith, who directs ORNL’s Center for Molecular Biophysics, explained, “Experiments tend to produce relatively simple and smooth-looking signals, as they only ‘see’ a molecule’s motions at low resolution. In contrast, data from a supercomputer simulation are complex and difficult to analyze, as the atoms move around in the simulation in a multitude of jumps, wiggles and jiggles.”
The ORNL solution calculates the peaks within the simulated and experimental data, creating distinct “dynamical fingerprints.”
Example of a computer simulation of a protein. | Photo animation courtesy of: ORNL/Hao-Bo Guo
Read more on how researchers learned even more than they expected from this innovation technique here.
An international collaboration among physicists and engineers from China, Russia, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, and DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab are investigating some of the most intriguing questions in basic physics. By exploring a phenomenon called neutrino mixing, this group hopes to learn how electrons and their cousins, muons and tau particles, came into existence in the moments after the big bang.
The answers to their investigations could explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe -- and why there is any matter at all.
Learn more about Daya Bay’s measurements of ө13 and check out a slide show of the experiment here.
