![Prasanna Balaprakash](/sites/default/files/styles/featured_square_large/public/2024-08/2023-P02525.jpg?h=502e75fa&itok=ePVQC-A5)
Balaprakash chosen for Tennessee’s new AI advisory council
The old photos show her casually writing data in a logbook with stacks of lead bricks nearby, or sealing a vacuum chamber with a wrench. ORNL researcher Frances Pleasonton was instrumental in some of the earliest explorations of the properties of the neutron as the X-10 Site was finding its postwar footing as a research lab.
For nearly six years, the Majorana Demonstrator quietly listened to the universe. Nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, or SURF, in Lead, South Dakota, the experiment collected data that could answer one of the most perplexing questions in physics: Why is the universe filled with something instead of nothing?