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

Cartoon depicting how the ionic liquid molecules arrange in electrically charged interfaces (not to scale).

Don’t Count Your Ions Before They Dissociate

Ionic liquids found to behave differently than expected.

High-energy x-ray diffraction pattern from a single grain of a gadolinium – cadmium alloy (shown in center) displaying the novel five-fold rotational symmetry, characteristic of an icosahedral quasicrystal.

A New Class of Magnetic Materials with Novel Structural Order

The discovery of the first binary magnetic quasicrystals will enable the unraveling of the fundamental relationship between the structure and magnetism in aperiodic materials.

Resonant scattering with coherent x-rays is used to probe the size and the dynamics of magnetic domains in a Dysprosium (one of the elements with highest magnetic strength) crystal with three different domains (shown in three colors in the schematic).

Magnetic Systems Mimic Granular Materials

Magnetic domains exhibit the same dynamic jamming behavior universal to granular materials, polymers, glasses and emulsions.

Protons and x-rays permit direct, nondestructive imaging of melting and solidification of metal alloys.

Using Protons to Peer into Metal Solidification

Proton radiography is a new tool for imaging melting and solidification of metals.

Scanning electron microscope image of a silicon surface hosting a nano-scale array of V-shaped gold antennas (metasurface) with different lengths, orientations, and angles.

Putting Light to Work at the Quantum Scale

Using artificial nanostructures to control the properties of light could play a prominent role in the future of computing.

The left figure shows computed positions for atoms at grain boundaries during deformation...

New Understanding of Radiation-Enhanced Deformation

When it comes to stressing a crystal during irradiation, not all atoms are created equal.

Distribution of superconductivity around holes (white) in a thin sheet of superconducting film.

A Breakthrough for High-Field Superconductors

Nano-structuring may help superconductors overcome a decades-long barrier to use in more powerful motors and magnets.

Addition of copper ions (Cu II) to protein monomers that are engineered with metal-coordination sites leads to the spontaneous metal-induced assembly of specifically designed protein cages.

Triggering “Flash” Assembly of Proteins

Designing protein assemblies whose interactions can be manipulated to respond to a single environmental cue.

The density of bonding electrons (red and yellow) in silicon (upper left) is rather evenly distributed, whereas in zinc oxide (upper right), it is concentrated around the oxygen atoms.

Understanding How Semiconductors Absorb Light

Advances in how we calculate optical properties of semiconductors shorten the path to improved solar cells and other optoelectronic devices.

[Left] Next generation multijunction solar cell with a dilute nitride middle junction (red) [Right] A transition from delocalized to localized electron trapping is directly observed in the photoluminescence (PL) spectra as the magnetic field is increased up to 57 Tesla.

Optimizing New Materials for Extreme Solar PV Performance

High magnetic fields reveal the existence of nitrogen superclusters.

Diagram showing the properties of a material as temperature and chemical composition (phosphorus level in this study) are varied.

What Causes High-temperature Superconductivity?

A phase change at absolute zero temperature may provide key insights into the decades-old mystery of high-temperature superconductivity.

Schematic illustration of cylinder-forming diblock copolymers...

Design Principles Revealed for a New Class of Functional Biomaterials

Ordered arrays of functional proteins with designed molecular properties created through self-assembly by combining proteins and synthetic polymers.