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

Schematic of a plasma wakefield accelerator using optical laser beams and electron driver, escort, and witness beams for generating bright, coherent X-ray laser beams with attosecond duration and sub-Angstrom wavelength.

Ice-Cold Plasma Electron Beams Prepare to Power Future Hard X-ray Laser Beams

Scientists chart a path to sub-femtosecond hard X-ray Free-Electron-Laser pulses powered by compact plasma-based accelerators.

Team members pose in the clean room (left). Thermal image of the 10.4 kW uranium-238 beam on the target (top right). Three never-before-seen isotopes, shown to the right of the red line on the particle identification plot (bottom right).

Scientists Accelerate Uranium Beam with Record Power

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams opens a new research avenue and observes three new rare isotopes.

The Compton polarimeter’s laser system, used to measure electrons’ parallel spin, is aligned during the Calcium Radius Experiment in Hall A of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

Laser-Sharp Look at Spinning Electrons Sets the Stage for New Physics Discoveries

Nuclear physicists shatter a nearly 30-year-old record for the measurement of parallel spin within an electron beam.

Two examples of silicon photoelectrodes. Left: Micropillar silicon with cobalt catalysts reduces carbon dioxide (CO2) to methanol (CH3OH). Right: Porous silicon with rhenium catalysts reduces carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon monoxide (CO).

For Solar Fuels, More Surface Area on Photoelectrodes Makes a Difference

High-surface area silicon improves light-driven reactions of carbon dioxide.

Scanning tunneling microscope map of a device made of three atomic layers of graphene. The contrast reveals the wavefunction of a chiral interface state (bright stripe) between two insulating regions having opposite chirality (dark color sides).

Chiral Asymmetry Creates a Path to High-Efficiency Future Electronics

Scientists learn how to manipulate quantum properties in graphene to create resistance-free, electricity channels for loss-free future electronics.

This image shows (a) the Nature magazine cover; (b) the single atom X-ray mechanism; (c) a supramolecular ring with one iron atom; (d) X-ray spectra of one iron atom; (e) a terbium dimer complex; (f) the X-ray spectra of one terbium atom.

For the First Time, Scientists X-Ray a Single Atom

Synchrotron X-ray spectroscopy allows atom-level examination of iron and terbium atoms.

Artist’s representation of gene expression in mycorrhizae-colonized roots as obtained by the combination of single-cell and spatial gene expression analyses.

Researchers Use a New Two-Dimensional Analysis to Build a Map of Gene Expression in Plant-Fungi Interactions

Spatial transcriptomics, combined with single-cell expression profiling, reveals new information on plant/arbuscular mycorrhizal interactions.

This electron microscope image shows spherical bismuth powder. Each particle in the photo is about the diameter of a human hair (approximately 60 micrometers).

Spherical Powders Enable New Applications for Metals

Free-flowing metal powders offer improvements for additive manufacturing, isotope production target fabrication, and more.

Shale is physically and chemically complex at all scales of interest. Multimodal, multiscale imaging, and characterization allows researchers to study how to control the transport and reactivity of matter inside complex porous structures such as shale.

Scientists Characterize Shale Cap Rocks at Tiny Scales

Years of basic scientific research crosscutting multiple disciplines produces new information on the nanoscale complexities of shale.

For the first time, researchers simultaneously achieved density above a historical empirical limit (>1.0) and very good confinement (~1.5) in a tokamak device.

Ground-Breaking Efforts Overcome an Operational Limit of Tokamaks, Advancing Efforts to Achieve Fusion Energy

By achieving very high density and confinement quality at the same time, researchers make new strides toward fusion energy.

This research studied the reduction of carbon monoxide to methanol using ruthenium complexes. Information about the ruthenium came from data collected at the National Synchrotron Light Source II.

An Improved Domino Chain for Sustainable Methanol Synthesis

Scientists used a series of three distinct, sequential reactions to transform carbon monoxide into methanol using proton-electron mediators.

Researchers combined high magnetic fields with X-ray scattering to reveal the connection between superconducting vortices (black circles), charge density waves (red wiggles), and spin density waves (blue wiggles) in a cuprate superconductor.

What Makes High Temperature Superconductivity Possible? Researchers Get Closer to a Unified Theory

Scientists discover that superconductivity in copper-based materials is linked with fluctuations of ordered electric charge and mobility of vortex matter.