University Research | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

Graduate Student Completes Prestigious Department of Energy Internship

This past summer, University of South Dakota graduate student Riley Paulsen travelled halfway across the country to participate in a prestigious and competitive internship funded by the Department of Energy.

Heart of the Matter: Physicists Record Movement of Atomic Nuclei

Physicists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Potsdam University are picking up good vibrations – via laser-driven excitations – after successfully recording the spring-like motion of a two-atom molecule.

UT-ORNL Team Hopes to Ease Path from Vegetation to Biofuel

Researchers led by Jeremy Smith at the UT-ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics are using a hundred-million processor hours on ORNL’s supercomputer Titan to pick apart lignin and increase biofuel production efficiency.

Yeast Knockouts Peel Back Secrets of Cell Protein Function

Scientists at the University of Madison-Wisconsin have completed a large-scale analysis on various proteins’ functions in mitochondria, using cutting-edge technology to analyze all the proteins in a yeast sample in one hour.

Awesome Internships at Argonne

Eight Northern Illinois University computer science students gained valuable experience interning this past summer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.

Big Trash Pickup

Cells are garbage pickers, carefully selecting the trash they want to keep or discard. New Arts & Sciences research at the Washington University in St. Louis shows how they handle big item pickup.

Microscope Becomes Gauge to Measure Forces Within Crystals

Researchers from Cornell and the University of Amsterdam have proposed a new method to measure the forces within colloidal materials, imaging the force distributions to understand and even predict material failures.

UConn Scientists Find Material’s Defects Improve Solar Cell Performance

A breakthrough materials mapping technique developed by UConn scientists has led to the discovery of highly-conductive properties in cadmium telluride, a promising material that could someday surpass the performance of silicon in solar cells.

Keep a Lid on It: USU Geologists Probe Geologic Carbon Storage

An international research group studied carbon storage in a natural laboratory in southeastern Utah, examining the long-term interactions between CO2, water and rocks, to determine the characteristics of geological formations able to effectively contain carbon dioxide emissions.

Vortex Laser Offers Hope for Moore’s Law

The optics advancement led by engineers at the University at Buffalo may solve an approaching data bottleneck by helping to boost computing power and information transfer rates tenfold.

Researchers ‘Watch’ Crystal Structure Change in Real Time

Washington State University researchers are making nanosecond movies showing the atomic-level changes of structural transformation under pressure, passing high-brilliance x-ray beams through the material and creating diffraction patterns in real time.

Anne White: A Passion for Plasma

Researcher Anne White develops systems to carry out measurements at MIT’s tokamak Alcator C-Mod and other research reactors, winnowing down the most promising fusion reactor system designs.