Creating Unconventional Metals - International team discovers quantum halfway house between magnet and semiconductor - The semiconductor silicon and the ferromagnet iron are the basis for much of mankind's technology, used in everything from computers to electric motors. An international group of scientists report that they have combined these elements with a small amount of another common metal, manganese, to create a new material which is neither a magnet nor an ordinary semiconductor. More...

LSU and Florida State University (FSU) are collaborating to develop the Array for Nuclear Astrophysics Studies with Exotic Nuclei (ANASEN) - ANASEN combines three different types of detectors to achieve an efficient and selective instrument for studies of nuclear reactions induced by low intensity beams of exotic nuclei. Solid-state and gaseous detector technologies are being developed with state-of-the-art electronics systems to provide accurate measurements of the energies and trajectories of charged ions over a large angular range. Students at LSU and FSU will develop and test detector elements that will be combined into a completed array and used in experiments with beams of exotic nuclei at the Fox Superconducting Accelerator Laboratory at FSU. More...

The relativistic spin precession of the binary pulsar system has now been measured to be 4.8⁰/year, in agreement with the general relativistic calculation of LSU researchers - The binary pulsar system PSR J0737-3039A/B consists of two closely spaced neutron stars in an edge-on configuration such that one pulsar eclipses the other once in every 2.45 hr orbit. More...