2016 | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

Revealing the Nature of Magnetic Interactions in Manganese Oxide

A team of scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Columbia University, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories, Institut Laue-Langevin in France, and the University of Warwick in England has used their recently developed mathematical approach to study the short-range magnetic interactions that they believe drive this long-range order.

Caught on Camera: First Movies of Droplets Getting Blown Up by X-ray Laser

Researchers have made the first microscopic movies of liquids getting vaporized by the world’s brightest X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Chemists Settle Longstanding Debate on How Methane is Made Biologically

Scientists from Pacific Northwest National Lab and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor determined that microbes make methane using a chemical reaction that involves a molecule, called a methyl radical, which was less favored by previous research. The team’s work, which appears in the journal Science, is vital for understanding how methane is made and how to make things from it.

ORNL Demonstrates Large-Scale Technique to Produce Quantum Dots

A method to produce significant amounts of semiconducting nanoparticles for light-emitting displays, sensors, solar panels and biomedical applications has gained momentum with a demonstration by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

CFN User Spotlight: Frances Ross Studies Nanowire Growth

Frances Ross, a materials scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, studies the mechanism by which atoms spontaneously self-assemble into nanowires—structures that are thousands of times longer than they are wide.

Technique Improves the Efficacy of Fuel Cells

Researchers using the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne have found a way to harness the quantum behavior of solid oxide fuel cells to make them even more efficient and robust.

Speeding Up Key Oxygen-Oxygen Bond-Formation Step in Water Oxidation

A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Adam Mickiewicz University, and Baruch College, City University of New York, has synthesized two new molecular catalysts for water oxidation.

Nusnin Akter: A Role Model for Young Women and Underrepresented Minority Engineers

Stony Brook University doctoral student and Brookhaven Lab guest researcher brings her passion and curiosity for scientific research to the lab and the community.

Berkeley Lab Scientists Discover Surprising New Properties in a 2-D Semiconductor

Working with scientists from the Advanced Light Source and Materials Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the researchers at Berkeley’s Molecular Foundry have synthesized a new class of semiconductor with exceptional optical characteristics – made of three-atoms thick, clean layers of molybdenum diselenide – then studied the material with a Molecular Foundry microscope that can visualize atoms and their electronic wave functions.

Crafting Complex Materials to Solve the Mystery of Magnetism

In the quest to synthesize a useful material not found in nature, a team led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory devised a multidimensional analysis approach that combines multiscale synthesis, characterization, and modeling techniques. With this approach, they obtained the first direct measurement of atomic-scale ordering in LMNO, a material of interest for thermoelectric applications.

Solving the Biomass Puzzle

A group of researchers at Iowa State University and the U.S Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory hope to develop the pieces of the biomass puzzle to create a clearer picture of what takes place within a plant and how that applies to its downstream uses as biomass.

Read more about Solving the Biomass Puzzle

Getting a Better Measure of Spin with Diamond

Using thin slivers of diamond, scientists at Jefferson National Lab created a detector that can withstand the constant particle bombardment that some experiments generate to obtain the most accurate measurements to date from the CEBAF atom smasher.