Quarter 1 2026
The close of 2025 was marked by profound sadness with the sudden and untimely passing of our dear friend and colleague Roderick (Rod) Clark in late December. It was deeply comforting, however, to witness how the division and colleagues across the lab came together to support one another and Rod’s family during this difficult time. Many colleagues from around the world reached out to share condolences and memories reflecting Rod’s long and influential career. He is greatly missed. We also learned in March of the very sudden and untimely passing of nuclear chemist Ken Gregorich, the former leader of the heavy element group at Berkeley Lab.
At the same time, the new year has brought with it a great deal of activity and excitement centered on the DOE Genesis Mission. In February, the Genesis Mission Consortium was launched as “a new public-private partnership designed to accelerate AI-driven scientific discovery and innovation,” alongside the publication of 26 National Science and Technology Challenges (NSTCs). The Nuclear Science Division is well-positioned to contribute to several of these NSTCs and, in collaboration with divisions across the Physical Sciences Area and the broader Lab, is already engaged in a number of Genesis-funded AI initiatives. In this issue, the offline reinforcement learning on the VENUS ion source is featured, demonstrating a path towards AI-support of ion source operation at the 88-Inch Cyclotron as well as other accelerators. As we prepare to further leverage AI to accelerate our scientific workflows, exciting results continue to emerge across the full NSD science and technology portfolio.
This issue of the newsletter highlights several of these advances. The LEGEND-200 experiment published its first results in its search for neutrinoless double beta decay of 76Ge. LBNL made significant contributions to the radiopure readout electronics, helping to ensure the superb energy resolution of the 76Ge detector signals. We also feature new Lattice QCD calculations that resolve a long-standing discrepancy among previous calculations of the two-nucleon system at heavier pion masses. While the calculations with those pion masses do not result in a bound deuteron – as one would expect near the physical pion mass –, the now established approach paves the way for calculations at the physical pion mass and the extraction of nuclear physics of few-nucleon systems directly from first principles. Rounding out this issue is a study of the so-called ρ′, or ρ(1600), hadron resonance through its decay into four charged pions. Using ALICE data from ultra-peripheral collisions at the LHC, the results support the interpretation of the ρ′ as a single resonance rather than two overlapping ones.
It was a pleasure to see the many innovative new LDRD proposals — as well as several strong renewal proposals — presented at the Physical Sciences Area and NSD LDRD events in February. Selecting the successful projects from such an impressive pool of submissions will be no small task. The proposal development and presentation process also provided a valuable opportunity to forge new collaborations and refine ideas that are well-positioned to attract additional funding.
Finally, I am excited to see the NSD’s outreach and social media efforts continuing to grow, bringing our science and technology innovations to ever-wider audiences. Most recently, the first two episodes of the new podcast Let’s Get Nuclear were released — exploring the journey to the absolute edge of the periodic table and the study of ghostly neutrinos with CUORE and CUPID. Go check them out!
