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

Physicists Zoom in on Gluons' Contribution to Proton Spin

By analyzing the highest-energy proton collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, nuclear physicists have gotten a glimpse of how a multitude of gluons that individually carry very little of the protons’ overall momentum contribute to the protons’ spin.

A New Spin on Quantum Computing: Scientists Train Electrons with Microwaves

An international research team, which included scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), demonstrated how to dramatically increase the coupling of microwaves in a specially designed superconducting cavity to a fundamental electron property called spin—which, like a coin, can be flipped.

Daya Bay Discovers a Mismatch

Daya Bay scientists provided the most precise measurement ever of the neutrino spectrum—that is, the number of neutrinos produced at different energies—at nuclear reactors. The experiment also precisely measured the flux, the total number of neutrinos emitted.

‘Lasers Rewired’: Scientists Find a New Way to Make Nanowire Lasers

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have found a simple new way to produce nanoscale wires that can serve as tiny, tunable lasers.

Graphene Leans on Glass to Advance Electronics

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University (SBU), and the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at SUNY Polytechnic Institute have developed a simple and powerful method for creating resilient, customized, and high-performing graphene: layering it on top of common glass.

SLAC X-ray Laser Turns Crystal Imperfections into Better Images of Important Biomolecules

A new study of imperfect crystals at SLAC’s LCLS X-ray laser has shown that the imperfections can be exploited to obtain much higher-resolution images than with conventional methods.

Scientists Take Nanoparticle Snapshots

An international team of researchers led by X-ray scientist Christoph Bostedt of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory and Tais Gorkhover of DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used two special lasers to observe the dynamics of a small sample of xenon as it was heated to a plasma.

AWARE Project Launched to Gain New Insights on Climate of Antarctica

Late last year, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, working with a group led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, embarked on a new project that will lead to a better understanding of how much of the sun’s light and the atmosphere’s heat radiation reach the Antarctic surface—variables that affect temperature patterns and ice melt throughout the region.

NREL Explains the Higher Cellulolytic Activity of a Vital Microorganism

Researchers at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) say better understanding of a bacterium could lead to cheaper production of cellulosic ethanol and other advanced biofuels.

MAGIC Continues to Inspire Insights

Researchers from multiple institutions are using the data obtain through MAGIC – the sea voyages in 2012 and 2013 that took continuous measurements of clouds and precipitation, aerosols, and atmospheric radiation from radiosondes launched by weather balloons every 6 hours over 200 days at sea – and improving our understanding of marine clouds.

Graphene is Strong, But Is It Tough?

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed the first known statistical theory for the toughness of polycrystalline graphene, which is made with chemical vapor deposition, and found that it is indeed strong (albeit not quite as strong as pristine monocrystalline graphene), but more importantly, its toughness—or resistance to fracture—is quite low.

Chiral Magnetic Effect Generates Quantum Current

Scientists at the U.S Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have discovered a new way to generate very low-resistance electric current in a new class of materials.