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

High-speed photographs of a falling water droplet on a nanostructured surface (top) before, (middle) during, and (bottom) after impact.

Super Water-Repellant Coatings Can Now Take the Pressure

Careful tuning of a surface at the nanoscale could lead to robust materials for solar panels, other uses.

Snapshots of a helium bubble just before bursting when grown at slow versus fast rates.

Double, Double Toil and Trouble: Tungsten Burns and Helium Bubbles

New models reveal the impact of competing processes on helium bubble formation in plasma-exposed tungsten.

Depiction of carbon nanotube (gray) inserted into a cell membrane, with a single strand of DNA (gold) passing through the nanotube.

Spontaneous Formation of Biomimetic, Nanoporous Membrane Channels

Carbon nanotubes insert into artificial and active cell membranes, reproducing major features of biological channels.

Changes in the crystal structure and electronic properties of vanadium dioxide (VO2) occur during its insulator-to-metal phase transition (V blue; O red)

Insulator-to-Metal Transition of Vanadium Dioxide

New studies explain the transition, providing a quantitative picture of a 50-year-old mystery.

Numerical simulation of the magnetic inhomogeneity (red = magnetism, blue = superconductivity) caused by replacing 1% of the indium atoms in a superconductor (CeCoIn5) with cadmium atoms.

A potential Rosetta Stone of high temperature superconductivity

Discovery paves the way to quantitatively investigate the interplay among magnetism, superconductivity and disorder in high temperature superconductors.

Illustration of the catalytic oxygen reduction reaction on the surface of platinum-nickel nanoframes with multilayered platinum skin structure

Multimetal Nanoframes Improve Catalyst Performance

Concentrating noble-metal catalyst atoms on the surface of porous nano-frame alloys shows over thirty-fold increase in performance.

Palladium-nickel nanoparticles (top structural model) are synthesized and then exposed to reactive gases (lower right) while being probed with high-energy x-rays.

Optimizing Atomic Neighborhoods for Speedier Chemical Reactions

Clusters with longer separations between atoms had enhanced catalytic activity.

Artist’s conception highlighting key features of electron behavior in bulk sodium bismuth (Na3Bi) and cadmium arsenic (Cd3As2).

Electrons Move Like Light in Three-Dimensional Solid

Tracking electronic motion in a graphene-like bulk material shows fast electrons in all dimensions.

The magnetic coercivity, the resistance to change in the orientation of the magnetic domain structure, for nickel (Ni) was shown to strongly depend on the crystal structure of the underlying oxide (vanadium oxide, V2O3).

Giant Magnetic Effects Induced in Hybrid Materials

Magnetic property changes by several hundred percent over a narrow temperature range.

Neutron diffraction data of barium iron arsenide with sodium ions substituted onto 24 percent of the barium sites (doping) showed evidence for a new magnetic phase in iron-based superconductors.

New Magnetic Phase Confirms Theoretical Predictions Related to Unconventional Superconductivity

Scientists uncover the microscopic origin of a magnetic phase in iron-based superconductors.

Scanning tunneling microscopy image shows a variable width graphene nanoribbon. Atoms are visible as individual “bumps.”

For “Ribbons” of Graphene, Width Matters

Thin widths change a high-performance electrical conductor into a semiconductor.

Crystal structure of the parent compound of a calcium-strontium-based cuprate superconductor [(Ca/Sr)2CuO3]

Predicting Magnetic Behavior in Copper Oxide Superconductors

New theoretical techniques predict experimental observations in superconducting materials.