News Archive | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

A closeup of the magnets that will drive the upgraded APS beams.

Beam Us Up

The upgrade of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory will make it between 100 and 1,000 times brighter than it is today.

2018’s Top Stories from the Office of Science

Twenty of our most popular stories from the past year.

Funding: DOE to Provide $16 Million for New Research into Atmospheric and Terrestrial Processes

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a plan to provide $16 million for new observational research aimed at improving the accuracy of today’s climate and earth system models.

Members of the Brookhaven National Laboratory team with the completed magnet assemblies for the CBETA project.

Brookhaven Delivers Innovative Magnets for New Energy-Recovery Accelerator

Test accelerator under construction at Cornell will reuse energy, running beams through multi-pass magnets that help keep size and costs down.

Argonne researchers will use machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to improve simulations of internal combustion engines. Sibendu Som and his team are collaborating with Convergent Science and Parallel Works as part of this research, which is funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy. The team will use the ALCF's Mira supercomputer as part of this engine modeling research. (Top image: Shutterstock / yucelyilmaz.)

Machine Learning Award Powers Argonne Leadership in Engine Design

As part of a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and two companies, Convergent Science and Parallel Works, engine modelers are beginning to use machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to optimize their simulations.

Strong spin-orbit coupling in halide perovskites induces splitting of the band edges, which could affect recombination rates. Image credit: X. Zhang and J.-X. Shen.

Shining Light on Recombination Mechanisms in Solar Cell Materials

Researchers at UCSB use NERSC supercomputers to better understand key mechanisms behind the solar conversion efficiencies of hybrid perovskites.

Sheng Dai innovates chemical separations, nanomaterials synthesis, and catalytic interfaces for energy applications at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and is the lab’s most prolific author. He is a Corporate Fellow researcher, leader of the Nanomaterials Chemistry Group, and director of the DOE Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport Center based at ORNL.

Sheng Dai: Building Teams, Not Empires

Dai is leader of the Nanomaterials Chemistry Group in the Chemical Sciences Division and a Corporate Fellow researcher at ORNL, who also holds a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is director of the Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport Center, or FIRST, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center based at ORNL that focuses on an atomistic understanding of electrolytes and electron transport to advance electrical energy storage.

This shows the size-induced transition to metallicity that takes place in a universal manner for all metallic elements, as gauged by the polarizability-based characteristic called degree of metallicity. As the clusters grow in size, they gradually become metallic and expel an external electric field from their interior (the Faraday cage effect in metals). (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)

New Discovery is Big on Nanoscale

Is it possible to predict what type of material an unidentified element will be in bulk quantities solely based on the properties it exhibits over a limited range of the subnano to nano size régime? It is, according to Argonne scientists.

Maria De La Cinta Lorenzo Martin, an Argonne scientist, oversees Northwestern University summer interns Ally O’Donnell, a senior in mechanical engineering, and Jacob Hechter, a junior in materials science, as they prepare wind turbine components for testing. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)

Making the Makers

A group of eight undergraduate students from Northwestern University gave their summer internships a twist by teaming up to learn about an array of different advanced manufacturing technologies at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. Both the students and laboratory staff say the internships yielded positive results.

Tribology Interns Find a Smooth Path to Research

Argonne scientists and engineers see their work with interns in the tribology group as an investment. Some of the interns will go on to get Ph.D.s, some will return to Argonne for careers — all of them offer fresh perspectives.

Brookhaven Lab scientists Mingyuan Ge, Iradwikanari Waluyo, and Adrian Hunt are pictured left to right at the IOS beamline, where they studied the growth pathway of an efficient catalyst for hydrogen fuel cells

Illuminating Nanoparticle Growth with X-rays

Using the ultrabright x-rays at NSLS-II and the advanced capabilities of NSLS-II’s In situ and Operando Soft X-ray Spectroscopy (IOS) beamline, researchers revealed the chemical characterization of the catalyst’s growth pathway in real time.

Machine Learning Award Powers Argonne Leadership in Engine Design

When attempting to design engines to be more fuel-efficient and emissions-free, automotive manufacturers have to take into account all the complexity inherent in the combustion process. With the help of supercomputing resources, researchers are now refining their computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to better capture the real-world behavior of these engines.