News Archive

Shedding New Light on Luminous Blue Variable Stars

Three-dimensional (3D) simulations run at two of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratory supercomputing facilities and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have provided new insights into the behavior of a unique class of celestial bodies known as luminous blue variables (LBVs) - rare, massive stars that can shine up to a million times brighter than the Sun.

Photo - James Collins, a condensed matter researcher at Monash University in Australia, works on an experiment at Beamline 10.0.1, part of Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source. (Credit: Marilyn Chung)

Topological Matters: Toward a New Kind of Transistor

Billions of tiny transistors supply the processing power in modern smartphones, controlling the flow of electrons with rapid on-and-off switching. But continual progress in packing more transistors into smaller devices is pushing toward the physical limits of conventional materials. Common inefficiencies in transistor materials cause energy loss that results in heat buildup and shorter battery life, so researchers are in hot pursuit of alternative materials that allow devices to operate more efficiently at lower power.

Compelling Evidence for Small Drops of Perfect Fluid

PHENIX publishes new particle-flow measurements to support their case that tiny projectiles create specks of quark-gluon plasma.

Illustration shows the experimental design of the simulated 3-D X-ray imaging experiment performed by scientists at Argonne, Northwestern and Cornell

New X-ray Imaging Approach Could Boost Nanoscale Resolution for Advanced Photon Source Upgrade

A long-standing problem in optics holds that an improved resolution in imaging is offset by a loss in the depth of focus. Now, scientists are joining computation with X-ray imaging as they develop a new and exciting technique to bypass this limitation.

Members of the MRX team with the device in the background. From left, Masaaki Yamada, Jongsoo Yoo, Jonathan Jara-Almonte, Will Fox, and Hantao Ji.

Experiments at PPPL Show Remarkable Agreement with Satellite Sightings

As on Earth, so in space. A four-satellite mission that is studying magnetic reconnection — the breaking apart and explosive reconnection of the magnetic field lines in plasma that occurs throughout the universe — has found key aspects of the process in space to be strikingly similar to those found in experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

Brookhaven physicist Tonica Valla in the OASIS laboratory at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Scientists Enter Unexplored Territory in Superconductivity Search

Scientists mapping out the quantum characteristics of superconductors—materials that conduct electricity with no energy loss—have entered a new regime.

Two-dimensional Materials Skip the Energy Barrier by Growing One Row at a Time

Confirming a century-old prediction could help scientists construct new classes of materials

Steve Cowley: The Knight Who Leads the Lab has "the Most Fun Job"

“It’s just all been fun, and this is the most fun job I’ve ever had,” Steve Cowley says of his much-decorated career and his new position, which he assumed July 1, as the seventh director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) — the place where the British-born physicist earned his doctorate and that he calls “the most important fusion laboratory in the world.”

Reflecting Antiferromagnetic Arrangements

An x-ray imaging technique developed at Brookhaven Lab's National Synchrotron Light Source II could help scientists understand—and ultimately control—the magnetic structure of promising materials for the development of electronic devices that exploit electron spin