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

Graphene Layered with Magnetic Materials Could Drive Ultrathin Spintronics

Tiny swirling textures in the magnetic fields within layered materials could be a key to replacing disk drives and flash memory in computing devices. Physicists at UC Davis and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are exploring how these patterns form in materials layered with graphene, an ultrathin form of carbon.

UAF, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Ink Collaborative Agreement

The University of Alaska Fairbanks and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have signed a five-year collaborative agreement to advance research on hydropower generation, marine renewable energy and underwater technology development.

Six Entrepreneurs Selected to Develop Innovative Technologies at Argonne

Six scientists from across the country have begun a two-year program at Argonne National Laboratory dedicated to build their energy and science technologies into products. They are the second annual cohort for the Chain Reaction Innovations program, which provides an institutional home for the postdoctoral researchers to develop their innovative technologies.

Physicists Use Terahertz Flashes to Uncover New State of Matter Hidden by Superconductivity

Using the physics equivalent of the strobe photography that captures every twitch of a cheetah in full sprint, researchers at Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory have used ultrafast spectroscopy to visualize electrons interacting as a hidden state of matter in a superconductive alloy.

UMD-led Study Shows How Earth Slows the Solar Wind to a Gentle Breeze

NASA satellite data reveals electron-scale energy transformation at the leading edge of Earth’s magnetic field.

Count on it: Peering at Atomic Structures with No More than Pencil and Paper

University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of California, Santa Barbara engineers predicted and confirmed the surface configuration for an important half-Heusler material called cobalt titanium antimony, which is a potentially useful semiconductor. The researchers measured the crystal surface with advanced imaging techniques, noting their pencil-and-paper predictions lined up perfectly with real atomic configurations.

Rutgers-led Research Could Lead to More Efficient Electronics

A Rutgers-led team of physicists has demonstrated a way to conduct electricity between transistors without energy loss, opening the door to low-power electronics and, potentially, quantum computing that would be far faster than today’s computers.

Hidden Magnetism Appears under Hidden Symmetry

Sometimes a good theory just needs the right materials to make it work. That’s the case with recent findings by UT’s physicists and their colleagues, who designed a two-dimensional magnetic system that points to the possibility of devices with increased security and efficiency, using only a small amount of energy.

Stanford Researchers Find Groundwater Pumping Can Increase Arsenic Levels in Irrigation and Drinking Water

Pumping an aquifer to the last drop squeezes out more than water. A Stanford study finds it can also unlock dangerous arsenic from buried clays – and reveals how sinking land can provide an early warning and measure of contamination.

Evidence for New Property of Quantum Matter Revealed

A theorized but never-before detected property of quantum matter has now been spotted in the lab at Johns Hopkins University.

Designing “Recipes” Using Artificial Intelligence

MIT researchers and their collaborators have demonstrated a novel system using artificial-intelligence techniques to help identify methods of fabricating materials, especially those that look promising in computer simulations.

Designing a Better Superconductor with Geometric Frustration

A new, dynamic system discovered by researchers at the University of Notre Dame and Argonne National Laboratory will enable ongoing adjustments to tiny tornadoes of supercurrent – called vortex filaments – to alter a material’s superconducting properties over time.