Publications by authors named "R L Varner"

Unlabelled: Climate and atmospheric deposition interact with watershed properties to drive dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations in lakes. Because drivers of DOC concentration are inter-related and interact, it is challenging to assign a single dominant driver to changes in lake DOC concentration across spatiotemporal scales. Leveraging forty years of data across sixteen lakes, we used structural equation modeling to show that the impact of climate, as moderated by watershed characteristics, has become more dominant in recent decades, superseding the influence of sulfate deposition that was observed in the 1980s.

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With excellent energy resolution and ultralow-level radiogenic backgrounds, the high-purity germanium detectors in the Majorana Demonstrator enable searches for several classes of exotic dark matter (DM) models. In this work, we report new experimental limits on keV-scale sterile neutrino DM via the transition magnetic moment from conversion to active neutrinos ν_{s}→ν_{a}. We report new limits on fermionic dark matter absorption (χ+A→ν+A) and sub-GeV DM-nucleus 3→2 scattering (χ+χ+A→ϕ+A), and new exclusion limits for bosonic dark matter (axionlike particles and dark photons).

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Using an 185-kg NaI[Tl] array, COHERENT has measured the inclusive electron-neutrino charged-current cross section on ^{127}I with pion decay-at-rest neutrinos produced by the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Iodine is one the heaviest targets for which low-energy (≤50  MeV) inelastic neutrino-nucleus processes have been measured, and this is the first measurement of its inclusive cross section. After a five-year detector exposure, COHERENT reports a flux-averaged cross section for electron neutrinos of 9.

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Article Synopsis
  • Wetlands produce a lot of methane (a type of gas), but scientists don't fully understand how the tiny organisms in these areas work, which makes it hard to know how much methane will be released as the climate changes.
  • Researchers studied a special wetland in Sweden called Stordalen Mire and discovered that many microbes there can create methane using different sources, like certain chemicals found in the water.
  • This study shows that both methane-producing and methane-using bacteria are important for understanding how gases are emitted from wetlands, especially as permafrost (frozen ground) thaws due to climate change.
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^{180m}Ta is a rare nuclear isomer whose decay has never been observed. Its remarkably long lifetime surpasses the half-lives of all other known β and electron capture decays due to the large K-spin differences and small energy differences between the isomeric and lower-energy states. Detecting its decay presents a significant experimental challenge but could shed light on neutrino-induced nucleosynthesis mechanisms, the nature of dark matter, and K-spin violation.

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