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My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, everyone.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but I’m not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didn’t have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That’s where we’re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer.

Way colder. Still waiting. She’s a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none.

I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. She’s a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. I’m figuring I’m dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts.

Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back.

*

I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldn’t sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesn’t run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I don’t call him that, though, what’s the point, there’s only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! That’s our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are_ spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. It’s dangerous, it’s an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so it’s a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess that’s enough.

Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees aren’t too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. That’s all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley.

I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. It’s a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. I’ve seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldn’t be believed. Like that. Like fucking why?

That’s what I asked Bangley, fucking why.

She would have caught you.

So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me. She maybe wanted food.

Maybe. Maybe she’d slit your throat in the middle of the night.

I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he can’t fly, I don’t have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.

I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm.

So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones.

Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job.

He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. That’s how Bangley talks. Because it’s thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a day’s walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they don’t bother us. That’s what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die.

We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know.

I know, I think: if I am going to die – no If – it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow.

Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said it’ll stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. We’re supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because it’s warm, but if it’s summer I mostly don’t. When I wear it, I feel like I’m waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn’t come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that.

This is an extract from The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Tinder Press), the August read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord here.

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For Christophe Jurczak at investment firm Quantonation, it all started at a conference that had nothing to do with quantum computing. Researchers were discussing a different emerging technology, and Jurczak realised that he had first heard about it 30 years ago. Back then, everyone was saying that it was only “five years away”. Déjà vu. Then, a worry set in – could quantum computers also be such a “perpetual five-year technology” (PFYT)? This drove him to do a year-long deep dive into philosophical literature. The paper I read was its outcome.

In it, he argues that, right now, quantum computers are firmly in the PFYT category. All attempts to forecast when quantum computers will truly arrive are misguided so long as they presuppose that we already know what quantum computers are, he writes. “If the identity of a quantum computer is still being settled as the machine develops, that presupposition fails.”

As someone who thinks about quantum computing an awful lot, I wanted to know what exactly brought Jurczak to this somewhat alarming conclusion. In the nearly five years that I have spent writing about quantum computers for New Scientist, they have certainly made measurable progress. Several firms have presented road maps for the future of their devices, including goals for their overall size and the performance of some of their components, and then they met those goals.

Quantum computers are also much closer to being useful devices than they were just a handful of years ago. Sure, they haven’t yet changed the world by aiding the discovery of some groundbreaking drug or battery redesign, but you could access a quantum computer through the cloud right now and use it as a scientific tool if you happen to be a chemist or a material scientist.

Jurczak doesn’t deny this. He even tells me that he recently ran an experiment remotely on a quantum computer made from extremely cold atoms that was housed in a lab in Canada while he was on his couch in Texas. But this doesn’t mean that the question of quantum computing is settled, he says. One way to see this is to note the diversity of approaches for building a quantum computer, as well as the many, many metrics that are important for capturing how well one might work.

The basic components of quantum computers are called qubits, and they can be built in many different ways, from using extremely cold atoms to tiny superconducting circuits or particles of light. Then, there are the things you may want to measure about your quantum computer: how many qubits it has, how well connected they are, how reliably they can be used for different parts of a computation, how quickly they can be controlled and so on. Perfecting one or even a few of these metrics typically doesn’t guarantee that all the others will become excellent too.

Having spoken to many researchers and executives within the field, I have come to recognise a certain mix of excitement and anxiety in how they often speak: celebrating all the components of a truly powerful machine having been proven to work by themselves, while trying to keep at bay the worry about what may happen when they are all put together.

In his paper, Jurczak, together with Brooke Abeles at ENS Paris-Saclay in France, collected data about some of these metrics across the industry and inferred a clear trend – once a threshold is crossed for one metric, such as guaranteeing that a single qubit makes errors less often than once in a thousand times, the five-year horizon doesn’t collapse. Instead, it resets. This is a consequence of discovering what a quantum computer is as it is being built.

This was distinctly not the case during the development of conventional computers. Jurczak says sometimes researchers like to compare today’s quantum computers to ENIAC, the world’s first programmable general-purpose electronic computer, but building that room-sized digital behemoth was much more of an engineering challenge. “[Classical computing] was a very much more mature ecosystem at the time when it started,” says Jurczak. While he was digging through philosophical literature, he found that an idea more relevant for quantum computers from the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon.

His theory of “technical individuation” says a shifting assembly of elements becomes a coherent “individual” through a process that includes a whole ecosystem, which consists of infrastructure, knowledge and practices maturing through iterative steps of trial and error. A collection of qubits and the devices that control and house them, for example, becomes a quantum computer only through interconnected developments in, for instance, laser and cryogenics systems, the building of special chip foundries, the growth of a specialised quantum workforce and basic research in quantum physics and computer science. Really, the list goes on; the ecosystem is large and complex.

As we talked, I found myself increasingly won over to Jurczak’s view of what has happened with quantum computing. The fact that we don’t have a fully useful quantum computer yet isn’t a failure of prediction, nor a failure of the market, but rather reflects the groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting nature of trying to corral the denizens of the quantum world into doing computational work for us. The technology is still too close to scientific discovery to be easily wrangled, easily scaled, easily accelerated by the usual tricks of the economy. “Don’t despair,” Jurczak puts a positive spin on it, “this is highly nonlinear, it takes time.”

Currently, the quantum computing industry has its sights on reaching “fault tolerance”, or building a quantum computer that is so good at catching its own errors that it can reliably run unprecedentedly complex computations. Once this goal is reached – and many firms are projecting they will do so by the end of the decade – will quantum computers have arrived? Will we know which type of qubit won the quantum-computing race? And what will be the next milestone?

Though Jurczak says that his framework isn’t predictive, it does begin to unravel some of these questions. Almost certainly the horizon will shift again, and not all the machines will be fully individuated. He says he is excited about the possibility of a really heterogenous quantum-computing system – no specific qubit design will win, they will just, through their own process of individuation, find applications they are well suited for. The question of what a quantum computer is won’t be answered by just one device. “The people who will build and use these machines should have more of an open mind about what a quantum computer is as a technical individual and how it concretises and how it’s going to be used as well,” says Jurczak.

Quantum computers won’t remain PFYTs forever, but he speaks about them currently being in that category with excitement. When he says that the constantly resetting horizon represents possibility, I can’t help but find that compelling. But what should quantum-computing firms do with this philosophical insight, I asked him. Certainly, they will still have to put out road maps and announce their goals. It’s important to have strategies for the next five years, he conceded. “We all want that and that’s needed, but think beyond and have a little bit of imagination as well, would be my take,” says Jurczak.

One way to achieve that may be to start working with people outside physics, maybe even philosophers themselves. The ecosystem for a quantum computer ought to be interdisciplinary. AI companies are already hiring across not just the sciences, but also the humanities, and it ought to happen with quantum-computing firms as well, he says. Jurczak believes AI agents themselves may also help accelerate some of that interdisciplinary work, as they aren’t trained in the specialised ways that human researchers are. He and several researchers at quantum-computing company Pasqal, which he co-founded, have already tested several examples of how such agents could help quantum-computing novices run computations on real quantum hardware. “If you ask me in five years what failure would really be, [it would be] that we still have these silos,” he says.

My own physics education was definitely siloed, and I was never asked to take a class in philosophy or the history of technology. Because a reporter’s job is to take both the broad view and the long view, I have, at times, felt the lack of that training rather sharply. The sheer amount of research in quantum computing is both impressive and overwhelming, and making sense of it has required a different skill set than merely being literate in the mathematics of quantum theory and somewhat conversant in materials science.

To be fair, the next time someone asks me what a quantum computer is, I will almost definitely not be telling them that it is a technical individual in an ever-evolving state of becoming. For anyone who isn’t actively trying to shape the fast-growing quantum computing industry, that won’t be very helpful. But the next time a paper reporting some narrow yet impressive advance crosses my desk, I will file it away as part of this evolution, reset my personal expectations clock and get at least a little excited about the quantum-computing horizon having just shifted. %!s()

How Scotland, and other parts of the world, became entranced by the fairytale only for the reality of sport's essential brutality to hit them square between the eyes at Celtic Park on denouement day.

If there is a non-Glasgow team capable of roughing up the big two as Heart of Midlothian did repeatedly last season then we're in for a wild ride.

If this league campaign goes to the final three minutes on the final day, if the domestic football story to beat all domestic football stories is in touching distance as the campaign swings for home next spring then we'll be blessed.

If. Nobody will be betting a brass farthing on history repeating itself, though. True, nobody really saw Hearts coming last time, but does lightning strike twice?

Hearts are in transition under new management and a raft of new players in the post-Derek McInnes, Lawrence Shankland age. They'll take time to settle.

Is there a different bolter out there? Motherwell, so easy on the eye last season, have had their guts ripped out in the summer and are also rebuilding, albeit playing with the same easy style as before.

Aberdeen? It would take a brave soul to support any claim for an Old Firm-challenging run, but in Stephen Robinson's first full season, they should go a whole lot better than last term.

Hibernian have the potential to push hard for third, but consistency problems follow them around year upon year. Falkirk, the other top-six club, would see a repeat of last season as a fantastic outcome, which it would be.

The plaintive cry is that young Scottish footballers get a chance to play a part in all this, that clubs trust their youth for a change. It's an appeal made this time every year and, for the most part, ignored.

We look to be back in the realms of a two-horse race and the two horses have experienced jockeys now, not two Old Firm apprentices like Russell Martin and Wilfried Nancy.

Hearts did so many outstanding things in taking the race to the wire, but both of those hapless characters helped them on their way. In Martin O'Neill and McInnes, the capacity for Celtic and Rangers slapstick, and that of an outsider causing them tremors, has been dramatically reduced.

The surreal cameos of Martin and Nancy and Hearts' thrilling surge that reverberated around the UK, Europe and parts of the wider world were just a few of things that made last season unmatchable in terms of drama and genuine gobsmacking moments.

The fall of Brendan Rodgers, and Dermot Desmond's startling evisceration of a celebrated manager, could only be rivalled if Celtic's major shareholder suddenly takes a flamethrower to his relationship with O'Neill.

Desmond's son, Ross, thought it a good idea to declare football war on the club's own supporters at an annual meeting that was promptly cancelled. On the really dark side, Peter Lawwell, the titan of 20 years at Parkhead, left while citing intolerable abuse of a section of the support that lost the run of themselves.

O'Neill's return was astonishing, his second return almost every bit as remarkable. Danny Rohl came and went at Rangers. Jimmy Thelin exited Aberdeen. St Mirren won a League Cup in thrilling circumstances and then almost got themselves relegated. Everybody fell in love with Jens Berthel Askou's Motherwell. Praise was heaped on the quality of Falkirk's football.

At the start of the season nobody foresaw much, if any, of this. What was more predictable then, as it is now, is the toxic nature of some of what goes around the biggest games.

As a club, Hearts have every right to remain livid at the crass goading of their players during the invasion that greeted Celtic's title win - and the tokenistic sanction that followed it.

The Scottish FA's independent review of the disgraceful scenes before, during and after the Old Firm Cup tie at Ibrox in March was thunderously critical of all parties - clubs, governing bodies, police.

Their recommendation, one of many, was that the SFA and Scottish Professional Football League start to get serious with stand closures and then stadium closures as a direct consequence of misbehaviour. Enough is enough was the mantra.

How long before the mettle of the governing bodies is tested? And how long before the independent report, in the face of resistance from the most powerful clubs in the land, is quietly forgotten about?

In the coming seasons, the narratives don't just begin and end on the pitch. The off-pitch stuff is compelling, too.

The standards of refereeing will be under the microscope like never before after the contentious and title-defining calls came in a mad flurry at the end of last season. We want the drama and the storylines of much of the campaign just gone, but we could do without the poisonous way it all finished in the final week or two.

Controversial decisions, threats to officials, a noxious atmosphere culminating with Celtic fans squaring up to Hearts players - it was a pitiful end to what been a thrilling season.

There will be surprises ahead, but at this remove it's hard to argue against the familiar sight of old rivals going head-to-head for the title.

The Celtic board spent much of last season and practically every day of the summer getting monstered by elements among their own support. They have, though, delivered two significant signings for huge money - Kasper Hogh and Camilo Duran.

Hogh is the pedigree striker that Celtic have lacked since Kyogo Furuhashi was around. Duran is more of a replacement for Daizen Maeda. At a reported £17m for the pair, Celtic have flexed their fiscal muscle.

There is consistent talk that midfielder Arne Engels and right-back Alistair Johnston might be leaving, so the Celtic of this week might still look considerably different to the Celtic of the coming months.

Even with another few comings and goings they're still the most settled side in the country - and the most proven. Fit-again centre-half Cameron Carter-Vickers will be like a new signing. If winger Jota can make a return to something close to his old self then Celtic will be hard to contain.

Rangers, under McInnes, have added beef and leadership, doughty characters rather than the flighty articles they have been attracted to for so long. McInnes will make them organised and robust.

Whether they have the creative wit to go with the physicality is another question. In Scottish terms, Rangers' American owners have spent colossal money, splurging tens of millions on the creation of a team, and an environment, that can win a league and do something in Europe.

From Martin's capricious management to the cold-blooded pragmatism of McInnes is some leap for Rangers. McInnes has broad shoulders, which is just as well, because there's a heavy burden of expectation there. There's enormous pressure on him.

He'll see it as an opportunity, of course. The biggest of his managerial life.

O'Neill versus McInnes looks to be the story of the season, unless there's another delicious sub-plot lurking in the long grass. %!s()

It’s been more than a decade since Lorde last fully graced a stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago. Back in 2014, the then-17-year-old was riding high on her megahit “Royals,” a rising star who looked every bit the comfortably chill teen backstage before her performance. And while she casually talked about being tapped curate The Hunger Games: Mockingjay  — Part 1 soundtrack and had set a record on the alternative chart with her breakthrough song, she already appeared headliner-ready, with her charisma and command of the stage.

She was set for the top of the bill in 2017, but torrential rains brought the fest to an early end and, after only a couple of songs, her show was cut short as the fest was evacuated.

On Thursday, she made her righteous return to that top spot, and it was a victory lap that was worth the wait. Her casual confidence was on display from the jump: She didn’t save her biggest hit for last, nor did she need to. Instead, she opened with “Royals,” which earlier this year joined the billion views club in YouTube views. Her set spanned all four of her records, with an emphasis on the cathartic reinvention found on her fourth LP, 2025’s Virgin.

Her performance was as much physical as it was emotional: For “Shapeshifter” she was on all fours, her lips kissed the mic throughout “Current Affairs,” “Oceanic Feeling” was met with Lorde dousing her face at a water fountain and stripping down to her bikini top, red lasers pierced through a black jacket she donned for “Man of the Year.” Festivals aren’t typically known as intimate settings, but the “witch from New Zealand,” as she at one point  referred to herself, managed to conjure a feeling of closeness amidst tens of thousands of people singing and dancing along to her raw, vulnerable material.

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Among the other highlights in a show filled with them were “Supercut,” “Green Light,” and “Girl, so Confusing” featuring an unannounced appearance from Charli XCX, who is headlining the festival on Friday.

Lorde moved into the crowd to a stage in the middle of the audience for the finale. “Let’s complete the circle from 2017 to 2014 to right now,” she said before completing her triumphant victory lap with the oldest song in her set, “Ribs.” %!s()

The findings, published in Nature in the study "Magnetic Character of the Low-Energy Enhancement in 70Zn," resolve a long-standing question in nuclear physics and could improve scientific models of how heavy elements are created in space.

The international collaboration brought together researchers from 25 institutions across the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, Norway and South Korea.

A Surprising Gamma-Ray Signal

Gamma rays belong to the same broad family of electromagnetic radiation as visible light and radio waves. When an excited atomic nucleus moves to a lower and more stable energy state, it can release energy in the form of gamma rays.

Scientists measure how often nuclei emit gamma rays at different energies using a quantity known as the gamma-ray strength function.

Transitions between nuclear energy states are described as either electric or magnetic. Each type reflects a different way that protons and neutrons reorganize inside a nucleus before releasing gamma rays.

For decades, scientists have detected an unexplained rise in the number of low-energy gamma rays emitted by certain nuclei. Known as the low-energy enhancement, or LEE, this feature appears in the gamma-ray strength function, but researchers had not been able to determine what produced it.

The experiment included staff scientists from several national laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (both National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, laboratories); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The work also reflects FRIB's larger partnership with national laboratories, which encourages the exchange of knowledge between fundamental research and national security applications. At the same time, the program gives students and early-career scientists practical training that supports the future nuclear workforce.

"This low-energy enhancement wasn't predicted by theory, so it was kind of a shock to the community when it was first observed," said Eleanor Ronning, lead author of the study and former FRIB graduate student who is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Padova, Italy. "It is difficult to predict where LEE occurs -- we don't know which nuclei will exhibit it."

The new measurements provide strong evidence that magnetic transitions within the nucleus are responsible for the enhancement.

"This is a key step forward," said Andrea Richard, co-lead of the study and assistant professor and interim director of the Edwards Accelerator Laboratory at Ohio University. "We now have a consistent explanation that connects experimental observations with theory."

Why the Discovery Matters for Astrophysics

Explaining LEE is important for understanding the internal structure of nuclei, but its significance extends far beyond nuclear physics.

The enhancement can increase the frequency of neutron-capture reactions beyond what scientists would normally predict. These reactions play a central role in producing heavy elements during extreme cosmic events, including supernovae and neutron star mergers.

Across many different nuclei, the combined effects of LEE can substantially change calculated reaction rates. Those changes can affect models of nuclear activity inside stars, nuclear energy systems, and NNSA national security applications.

Measuring a Faint and Elusive Effect

LEE has been exceptionally difficult to study because scientists cannot easily predict where it will appear. Its signal is also weak and can be obscured by background noise, making highly precise equipment and advanced analysis methods essential.

"Our collaboration has been searching for ways to identify the nature of this low-energy enhancement in gamma-ray emission for over a decade," said Artemis Spyrou, professor of physics at FRIB and in Michigan State University's Department of Physics and Astronomy. "This result only became possible thanks to the development of new experimental capabilities and new analysis techniques that did not exist when we began."

Sean Liddick, professor of chemistry at FRIB, interim chairperson of MSU's Department of Chemistry, and Ronning's graduate advisor, said the study depended on experimental resources available only at FRIB.

"We used a novel experimental technique that combines specialized instruments in a way that effectively used the entire facility," Liddick said. "It is exciting to see that effort lead to such a clear result."

Two Paths Into Zinc-70

The researchers focused on zinc-70, a nucleus believed to show the low-energy enhancement and one whose arrangement of energy levels is already well understood. Instead of studying zinc-70 directly, they examined the beta decay of two separate states of its parent nucleus, copper-70.

The team isolated copper-70 in two forms: its ground state and an excited, or isomeric, state. These two states provided separate pathways into zinc-70.

Each pathway filled a different combination of energy levels within zinc-70, allowing researchers to observe its nuclear structure from two complementary perspectives.

Producing the two pathways required exceptionally pure beams of both copper-70 states. The researchers created them with FRIB's Low Energy Beam and Ion Trap, or LEBIT, a high-precision mass spectrometer.

"We used LEBIT in this way for the first time," said Ryan Ringle, associate professor of physics at FRIB and LEBIT group leader. "It was an interesting challenge to work on, which provided additional training opportunities for our group's graduate students. This new technique for isomer separation opens the door to study many more nuclei and motivates technical developments to expand our capabilities in this area."

Magnetic Transitions Reveal the Answer

The gamma rays released by zinc-70 were recorded with the Summing NaI, or SuN, detector. Researchers then used two analytical approaches, the beta-Oslo method and the Shape method, to determine the gamma-ray strength function associated with each initial state.

Comparing the two strength functions allowed the team to determine conclusively that magnetic transitions inside the nucleus produce the low-energy enhancement.

The result gives nuclear theorists a new experimental benchmark and provides a strategy for investigating the phenomenon in additional nuclei.

"We look forward to applying this separated-isomers technique to more nuclei," Liddick said. "Knowing which nuclei should exhibit this low-energy enhancement is key to designing experiments to investigate them at facilities like FRIB and to improve models of how elements are created in astrophysical environments."

Training Future Nuclear Scientists

The project also demonstrates the value of collaboration among institutions, established researchers, students and postdoctoral scholars.

Ronning and Richard helped write the experimental proposal during FRIB's second call for proposals by its Program Advisory Committee. Both were early in their careers at the time. Ronning was a graduate student at FRIB, while Richard was a postdoctoral scholar at LLNL.

After completing her first postdoctoral position at MSU, where she worked in nuclear astrophysics and national security, Richard pursued opportunities that connected fundamental science with NNSA mission objectives. That path led to another postdoctoral position at LLNL.

Now based at Ohio University, she continues to contribute to both basic research and national security efforts.

"The combined expertise of our research teams is what really made it all possible," Richard said. "It was a privilege to work with the various teams across institutions over the years. It was a formative experience as an early-career researcher."

For Ronning, the publication marked the completion of a project she had helped guide from its earliest stages.

"Working on the entire process -- from writing the proposal and running the experiment to publishing the paper in Nature -- has been a rewarding experience," Ronning said.

This research is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the U.S. Nuclear Data Program, the Research Council of Norway, the Norwegian Nuclear Research Center, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. %!s()