News Archive | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

Fluoride (pink) floats in liquid electrolyte BTFE. Image Credit: Brett Savoie, Purdue University

Caltech Team Models Novel Battery Chemistries on Titan to Help Make Fluoride Batteries a Reality

A team led by the California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech’s) Thomas Miller used the 27-petaflop Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) to understand and refine the electrolyte’s properties and confirm its unprecedented ability to conduct fluoride ions and retain chemical stability at room temperature, making the breakthrough material the first of its kind in the battery world.

On Sept. 24, scientists and information technology specialists from various labs in the United States and Europe participated in a full-day workshop—hosted by the Scientific Data and Computing Center at Brookhaven Lab—to share challenges and solutions to providing centralized computing support for photon science. From left to right, seated: Eric Lancon, Ian Collier, Kevin Casella, Jamal Irving, Tony Wong, and Abe Singer. Standing: Yee-Ting Li, Shigeki Misawa, Amedeo Perazzo, David Yu, Hironori Ito, Krishna Muriki, Alex Zaytsev, John DeStefano, Stuart Campbell, Martin Gasthuber, Andrew Richards, and Wei Yang.

Lighting the Way to Centralized Computing Support for Photon Science

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory hosted a one-day workshop on Sept. 24 for information technology (IT) specialists and scientists from various labs around the world to discuss best practices and share experiences in providing centralized computing support to photon science.

Beginning in late November 2015, a set of ARM equipment was deployed to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, including basic radiometric, surface energy balance and upper air equipment directly to make the first well-calibrated climatological suite of measurements seen in this extremely remote, but globally critical, region in more than 40 years. (Image by U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement [ARM] Research Facility.)

Clouds with a Chance of Warming

Researchers from Argonne’s Environmental Science division participated in one of the largest collaborative atmospheric measurement campaigns in Antarctica in recent decades.

ORNL computational scientists Loukas Petridis (left) and Jeremy Smith use supercomputers to better understand how plants can be turned into fuel and other useful materials. The duo recently published a paper in Nature Reviews Chemistry summarizing molecular-level concepts derived from 10 years of research.

Breaching the Biomass Problem

Using supercomputers, a team from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has made several fundamental discoveries related to the challenges associated with breaking down biomass.

ORNL scientists have created a new composite material for additive manufacturing that makes use of lignin, a biofuels byproduct.

New Composite Advances Lignin as a Renewable 3D Printing Material

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created a recipe for a renewable 3D printing feedstock that could spur a profitable new use for an intractable biorefinery byproduct: lignin.

This shows how a plane electron wave and a magnetic charge interact, forming an electron vortex state that carries orbital angular momentum. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)

Scientists Use Magnetic Defects to Achieve Electromagnetic Wave Breakthrough

In a new study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, scientists have created small regions of magnetic defects made from nanoscale magnetic islands assembled into a grid. The plane waves interact with these defects, thereby generating helical waves.

The Journal of Visualized Experiments recently published a video providing step-by-step instructions for a high-resolution nanopatterning technique developed by scientists at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials.

Creating Nanoscale Patterns at Record Resolution: An Instructional Video

The Journal of Visualized Experiments recently published a video showing how an electron microscope-based lithography technique developed at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials can be used to define single-digit nanometer patterns in conventional electron-beam resists.

Funding: Department of Energy Announces $16 Million for Low-Temperature Plasma Research Centers and Facilities

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a plan to provide $16 million to establish new centers and collaborative research facilities for research in low-temperature plasma science and engineering.

Scientists analyzed the gamma rays emitted during the NPDGamma Experiment and found parity-violating asymmetry, which is a specific change in behavior in the force between a neutron and a proton. They measured a 30 parts per billion preference for gamma rays to be emitted antiparallel to the neutron spin when neutrons are captured by protons in liquid hydrogen. After observing that more gammas go down than up, the experiment resolved for the first time a mirror-asymmetric component or handedness of the weak force. Credit: Andy Sproles/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Precision Experiment First to Isolate, Measure Weak Force Between Protons, Neutrons

A team of scientists has for the first time measured the elusive weak interaction between protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. They had chosen the simplest nucleus consisting of one neutron and one proton for the study.

Raju Venugopalan and Mark Mace, two members of a collaboration that maintains quantum mechanical interactions among gluons are the dominant factor creating particle flow patterns observed in collisions of small projectiles with gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

Theory Paper Offers Alternate Explanation for Particle Patterns

A group of physicists analyzing the patterns of particles emerging from collisions of small projectiles with large nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) say these patterns are triggered by quantum mechanical interactions among gluons, the glue-like particles that hold together the building blocks of the projectiles and nuclei.

The Gluonic Excitations Experiment, or GlueX, aims to gain new insight into the force that binds all matter together. The GlueX collaboration of scientists are now working on analyzing the full set of data collected in the first phase of the experiment.

Gluex Completes First Phase

An experiment that aims to gain new insight into the force that binds all matter together has recently completed its first phase of data collection at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

Read more about Gluex Completes First Phase

Funding: Department of Energy Announces $14 Million for Research on Fusion Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a plan to provide $14 million for new research on fusion energy. Research will be based on data from one of the nation’s foremost fusion energy facilities, the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility at General Atomics in San Diego.