2017 | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

Neutrons Detect Elusive Higgs Amplitude Mode in Quantum Material

A team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has used sophisticated neutron scattering techniques to detect an elusive quantum state known as the Higgs amplitude mode in a two-dimensional material.

Electron Orbitals May Hold Key to Unifying Concept of High-Temperature Superconductivity

A team of scientists has found evidence for a new type of electron pairing that may broaden the search for new high-temperature superconductors.

Science Happens at the Border of Different Disciplines

Under the FICUS initiative, researchers leverage capabilities and resources across the Department of Energy user facilities such as the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory and the Joint Genome Institute in pursuit of a single, overarching research goal that cannot be achieved with the capabilities at a single facility.

Scientists Get First Direct Look at How Electrons ‘Dance’ with Vibrating Atoms

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have made the first direct measurements, and by far the most precise ones, of how electrons move in sync with atomic vibrations rippling through an exotic material, as if they were dancing to the same beat.

PPPL Researchers Demonstrate First Hot Plasma Edge in a Fusion Facility

Recent experiments on the Lithium Tokamak Experiment (LTX), the first facility to fully surround plasma with liquid lithium, showed that lithium coatings can produce temperatures that stay constant all the way from the hot central core of the plasma to the normally cool outer edge.

A Whole-Genome Sequenced Rice Mutant Resource for the Study of Biofuel Feedstocks

A team led by Pamela Ronald, a professor in the Genome Center and the Department of Plant Pathology at UC Davis and director of Grass Genetics at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), with collaborators from UC Davis and the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI), reported the first whole-genome sequenced fast-neutron induced mutant population of Kitaake, a model rice variety with a short life cycle.

Brookhaven Scientists Study Role of 'Electrolyte Gating' in Functional Oxide Materials

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a previously unknown mechanism involved in “electrolyte gating,” a method for increasing electrical conductivity in materials and potentially inducing superconductivity.

Argonne's Theta Supercomputer Goes Online

Theta, a new production supercomputer located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonnne National Laboratory is officially open to the research community. The new machine’s massively parallel, many-core architecture continues Argonne’s leadership computing program towards its future Aurora system.

How Hot is Too Hot in Fusion?

Using the 27-petaflop Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a team of researchers based at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory are predicting how ITER—the world’s largest experimental magnetic fusion reactor, currently under construction in France—will withstand the extreme heat involved in extracting exhaust.

How Brian Tierney’s “Aha Moment” Turned into a 28-year Career at Berkeley Lab

As he prepares to retire this month after more than 28 years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Brian Tierney, head of ESnet’s Advanced Network Technologies Group, still remembers the exact moment when he knew where his career path would lead.

Brookhaven Lab's Scientific Data and Computing Center Reaches 100 Petabytes of Recorded Data

The storage system of the Scientific Data and Computing Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory is one of the largest in the world, containing 17 years of experimental physics data collected by thousands of scientists and engineers.

What’s On Your Skin? Archaea, That’s What

A study by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Medical University of Graz has found that the skin microbiome also contains archaea, a type of extreme-loving microbe, and that the amount of it varies with age.