2018 | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

SBU Physicists Among BNL Research Group Studying the Perfect Fluid

Researchers from Stony Brook University are among a group of nuclear physicists analyzing data from the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) — a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Results of their work provide additional evidence that collisions of miniscule projectiles with gold nuclei create tiny specks of the perfect fluid that filled the early universe.

System Monitors Radiation Damage to Materials in Real-time

Researchers at MIT and Sandia National Laboratories have developed, tested, and made available a new system that can monitor radiation-induced changes continuously, providing more useful data much faster than traditional methods.

Sasha Tchekhovskoy Receives High-Performance Computing Award

Alexander “Sasha” Tchekhovskoy was granted the highly-competitive 2019 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) Award for his research proposal,Simulating Neutron Star Binary Merger Remnant Disks and Tilted Thin Disks.

UM Rosenstiel School Professor Receives Over $650,000 in Funding for Climate Forecasting

University of Miami (UM) Professor Ben Kirtman received more than $650,000 in funding for his work to improve regional and global climate forecasting. Kirtman, who has been at the UM Rosenstiel School for over 10 years, is a professor of Atmospheric Sciences and director of the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS).

Stanford Researchers Make Movies of Photochemistry in Single Nanoparticles

Stanford researchers retooled an electron microscope to work with visible light and gas flow, making it possible to watch a photochemical reaction as it swept across a nanoparticle the size of a single cold virus.

Caltech Startup Aims to Make Solar Panels More Efficient

Technology developed at Caltech seeks to improve the efficiency of solar panels by tweaking the architecture of the metal-grid layout of individual cells.

Vanderbilt Physicists Help Find Compelling Evidence for Small Drops of Perfect Fluid

Scientists from Vanderbilt University and the University of Colorado have discovered that surprisingly small droplets of a nearly perfect fluid appear in nuclear collisions recorded by the PHENIX detector. Tiny projectiles seem to be creating a quark-gluon plasma, a primordial cosmic soup from which all the visible matter and energy in the universe originally formed.

Naturally Occurring “Batteries” Fueled Organic Carbon Synthesis on Mars

Mars’ organic carbon may have originated from a series of electrochemical reactions between briny liquids and volcanic minerals, according to new analyses of three Martian meteorites from a team led by Carnegie’s Andrew Steele published in Science Advances.

UT Austin Selected for New Nationwide High-Intensity Laser Network

The University of Texas at Austin will be a key player in LaserNetUS, a new national network of institutions operating high-intensity, ultrafast lasers. The overall project, funded over two years with $6.8 million from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, aims to help boost the country's global competitiveness in high-intensity laser research.

Chemistry Professor's Research Shocking the Battery Field

Feng Lin, an assistant professor in the College of Science at Virginia Tech, has had a productive year with over 10 published papers on battery research in 2018. Lin’s work covers the gamut of chemistry and materials science battery research, looking at micro-scale and basic science aspects, as well as macro-scale and applied science.

Shedding New Light on Photosynthesis

University of Michigan researchers have developed a powerful microscope that can map how light energy migrates in photosynthetic bacteria on timescales of one-quadrillionth of a second.

Middle Eastern Desert Dust on the Tibetan Plateau Could Affect the Indian Summer Monsoon

New atmospheric modeling study, led by William Lau, a research scientist at the University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC), could explain the mechanism behind a century-old hypothesis.