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

Poof! The Weird Case of the X-ray that Came Out Blank

Researchers at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source have observed a nonlinear optical effect, called “stimulated scattering,” that had never been seen in X-rays before and is a milestone in the quest to understand how light interacts with matter.

Neutrino Experiments Utilize ORNL Experts, Equipment to Explore the Unknown

Three large neutrino experiments – PROSPECT and COHERENT, both based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and the Majorana Collaboration based at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota – are gearing up with researchers from many institutions to advance our understanding of neutrino physics.

PPPL and Princeton Help Lead a New Center to Understand and Mitigate Runaway Electrons that Pose a Challenge for ITER

Researchers from nine U.S. universities and national laboratories are working together to explore the causes and solutions for runaway electrons, which travel at nearly the speed of light and could damage the interior walls of future tokamaks.

How to Keep the Superhot Plasma Inside Tokamaks from Chirping

Using computer simulations at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, researchers discovered conditions that explains the phenomenon of chirping – a wave in plasma that breaks from a single note into rapidly changing notes - and may help to optimize the design of fusion energy plants in the future.

Graduate Student Eric Metodiev Finds Freedom and His Voice in Physics

Under the mentorship of Bill Morse in the Physics Department, Metodiev has worked for the past four years on the Muon g-2 experiment, studying the properties of muons, tiny subatomic particles that exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second.

Stony Brook University's Samema Sarowar Awarded Renate W. Chasman Scholarship

Samema Sarowar, a biosciences student at Stony Brook University (SBU), has been awarded the 2016 Renate W. Chasman scholarship. Brookhaven Women in Science (BWIS), a not-for-profit organization at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, offers the scholarship to qualified candidates to encourage women to pursue careers in science, engineering, or mathematics.

Unveiled: Earth’s Viral Diversity

DOE JGI researchers utilized the largest collection of assembled metagenomic datasets from around the world to uncover over 125,000 partial and complete viral genomes, the majority of them infecting microbes and providing researchers with a unique resource of viral sequence information.

Scientists Uncover the Origin of High-Temperature Superconductivity in Copper-Oxide Compound

Analysis of thousands of samples reveals that the compound becomes superconducting at an unusually high temperature because local electron pairs form a "superfluid" that flows without resistance.

FM Global Researchers Say “ADIOS” to Bottlenecks at OpenFOAM Conference

Researchers from commercial property insurer FM Global use OLCF-developed middleware to drastically improve fire suppression simulations. The team used OLCF resources to test the speed and restart capability of ADIOS while simulating the spray dynamics from a sprinkler.

Energy Department to Invest $16 Million in Computer Design of Materials

Two four-year projects—one team led by DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the other team led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)—will take advantage of superfast computers at DOE national laboratories by developing software to design fundamentally new functional materials destined to revolutionize applications in alternative and renewable energy, electronics, and a wide range of other fields.

Sugar Hitches a Ride on Organic Sea Spray

Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Montana State University, and Los Alamos National Laboratory found this "sticky" strategy not only shields these molecules from their soluble nature, it explains the discrepancies between models that predict sea spray's organic enrichment and the actual measurements of sea spray aerosol composition.

Big PanDA Tackles Big Data for Physics and Other Future Extreme Scale Scientific Applications

Physicists tap into pockets of available time on a supercomputer to crunch data for the world's most powerful particle collider, demonstrating a new tool for making efficient use of limited, expensive computational resources.