Can new batteries eliminate need for cobalt mined by kids?

Scientists have developed a long-lasting battery made with nickel.

The discovery could reduce or even eliminate the use of cobalt in the batteries that power electric cars and other products.

Cobalt is often mined using child labor.

“Nickel doesn’t have child labor issues,” says Huolin Xin, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.

The method could usher in a new, less controversial generation of lithium-ion batteries.

Until now, nickel wasn’t a practical substitute because large amounts of it were required to create lithium batteries, Xin says. And the metal’s cost keeps climbing.

To become an economically viable alternative to cobalt, nickel-based batteries needed to use as little nickel as possible.

“We’re the first group to start going in a low-nickel direction,” Xin says. “In a previous study by my group, we came up with a novel solution to fully eliminate cobalt. But that formulation still relied on a lot of nickel.”

To solve that problem, Xin’s team spent three years devising a process called “complex concentrated doping” that enabled the scientists to alter the key chemical formula in lithium-ion batteries as easily as one might adjust seasonings in a recipe.

The doping process, Xin explains, eliminates the need for cobalt in commercial components critical for lithium-ion battery functioning and replaces it with nickel.

“Doping also increases the efficiency of nickel,” says Xin, which means EV batteries now require less nickel to work—something that will help make the metal a more attractive alternative to cobalt-based batteries.

Xin says he thinks the new nickel chemistry will quickly start transforming the lithium-ion battery industry. Already, he says, electric vehicle companies are planning to take his team’s published results and replicate them.

“EV makers are very excited about low-nickel batteries, and a lot of EV companies want to validate this technique,” Xin says. “They want to do safety tests.”

The study appears in the journal Nature Energy.

Source: UC Irvine

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Team detects neutrinos created by particle collider for the first time

In a scientific first, researchers have detected neutrinos created by a particle collider.

The discovery promises to deepen scientists’ understanding of the subatomic particles, which were first spotted in 1956 and play a key role in the process that makes stars burn.

The work could also shed light on cosmic neutrinos that travel large distances and collide with the Earth, providing a window on distant parts of the universe.

It’s the latest result from the Forward Search Experiment, or FASER, a particle detector designed and built by an international group of physicists and installed at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. There, FASER detects particles produced by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

“We’ve discovered neutrinos from a brand-new source—particle colliders—where you have two beams of particles smash together at extremely high energy,” says Jonathan Feng, a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-spokesperson for the FASER Collaboration.

Neutrinos, which were co-discovered nearly 70 years ago by the late physicist and Nobel laureate Frederick Reines, are the most abundant particle in the cosmos and “were very important for establishing the standard model of particle physics,” says FASER co-spokesperson Jamie Boyd, a particle physicist at CERN. “But no neutrino produced at a collider had ever been detected by an experiment.”

Since the groundbreaking work of Reines and others like Hank Sobel, professor of physics and astronomy, the majority of neutrinos studied by physicists have been low-energy neutrinos. But the neutrinos detected by FASER are the highest energy ever produced in a lab and are similar to the neutrinos found when deep-space particles trigger dramatic particle showers in our atmosphere.

“They can tell us about deep space in ways we can’t learn otherwise,” says Boyd. “These very high-energy neutrinos in the LHC are important for understanding really exciting observations in particle astrophysics.”

FASER itself is new and unique among particle-detecting experiments. In contrast to other detectors at CERN, such as ATLAS, which stands several stories tall and weighs thousands of tons, FASER is about one ton and fits neatly inside a small side tunnel at CERN. And it took only a few years to design and construct using spare parts from other experiments.

“Neutrinos are the only known particles that the much larger experiments at the Large Hadron Collider are unable to directly detect, so FASER’s successful observation means the collider’s full physics potential is finally being exploited,” says Dave Casper, an experimental physicist.

Beyond neutrinos, one of FASER’s other chief objectives is to help identify the particles that make up dark matter, which physicists think comprises most of the matter in the universe, but which they’ve never directly observed.

FASER has yet to find signs of dark matter, but with the LHC set to begin a new round of particle collisions in a few months, the detector stands ready to record any that appear.

“We’re hoping to see some exciting signals,” says Boyd.

Brian Petersen, a particle physicist at CERN, announced the results at the 57th Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories conference in Italy.

Source: UC Irvine

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Could ‘terminator zones’ on far off planets harbor life?

Extraterrestrial life has the potential to exist on distant exoplanets inside special areas called “terminator zones,” according to a new study.

The terminator zone is a ring on planets that have one side that always faces its star and one side that is always dark.

“These planets have a permanent day side and a permanent night side,” says lead author Ana Lobo, a postdoctoral researcher in the physics and astronomy department at the University of California, Irvine.

Such planets are particularly common because they exist around stars that make up about 70% of the stars seen in the night sky—so-called M-dwarf stars, which are relatively dimmer than our sun, Lobo says.

The terminator is the dividing line between the day and night sides of the planet. Terminator zones could exist in that “just right” temperature zone between too hot and too cold.

“You want a planet that’s in the sweet spot of just the right temperature for having liquid water,” says Lobo, because liquid water, as far as scientists know, is an essential ingredient for life.

On the dark sides of terminator planets, perpetual night would yield plummeting temperatures that could cause any water to be frozen in ice. The side of the planet always facing its star could be too hot for water to remain in the open for long.

“These new and exotic habitability states our team is uncovering are no longer the stuff of science fiction.”

“This is a planet where the dayside can be scorching hot, well beyond habitability, and the night side is going to be freezing, potentially covered in ice. You could have large glaciers on the night side,” Lobo says.

For the study, which appears in The Astrophysical Journal, Lobo and Aomawa Shields, an associate professor of physics and astronomy, modeled the climate of terminator planets using software typically used to model our own planet’s climate, but with a few adjustments, including slowing down planetary rotation.

It’s believed to be the first time astronomers have been able to show that such planets can sustain habitable climates confined to this terminator region.

Historically, researchers have mostly studied ocean-covered exoplanets in their search for candidates for habitability. But now that Lobo and her team have shown that terminator planets are also viable refuges for life, it increases the options life-hunting astronomers have to choose from.

“We are trying to draw attention to more water-limited planets, which despite not having widespread oceans, could have lakes or other smaller bodies of liquid water, and these climates could actually be very promising,” Lobo says.

One key to the finding, Lobo adds, was pinpointing exactly what kind of terminator zone planet can retain liquid water. If the planet is mostly covered in water, then the water facing the star, the team found, would likely evaporate and cover the entire planet in a thick layer of vapor.

But if there’s land, this effect shouldn’t occur.

“Ana has shown if there’s a lot of land on the planet, the scenario we call ‘terminator habitability’ can exist a lot more easily,” says Shields. “These new and exotic habitability states our team is uncovering are no longer the stuff of science fiction—Ana has done the work to show that such states can be climatically stable.”

Recognizing terminator zones as potential harbors for life also means that astronomers will need to adjust the way they study exoplanet climates for signs of life, because the biosignatures life creates may only be present in specific parts of the planet’s atmosphere.

The work will also help inform future efforts by teams using telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope or the Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor telescope currently in development at NASA as they search for planets that may host extraterrestrial life.

“By exploring these exotic climate states, we increase our chances of finding and properly identifying a habitable planet in the near future,” says Lobo.

Source: UC Irvine

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