University Research | 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).

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.

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.

Molecular Virologists Fight Influenza at the Molecular Level

In research to improve influenza therapies against H7N9 and other influenza strains, molecular virologist Chad Petit, Ph.D., and his University of Alabama at Birmingham colleagues have detailed the binding site and mechanism of inhibition for two small-molecule experimental inhibitors of influenza viruses.

MSU Professor Awarded Grant to Harvest Medical Isotopes at FRIB

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Office of Nuclear Physics awarded nearly $357,000 to a Michigan State University chemist to look into new methods of gathering rare isotopes.

"Folded" Optical Devices Manipulate Light in a New Way

The next generation of electronic devices, ranging from personal health monitors and augmented reality headsets to sensitive scientific instruments that would only be found in a laboratory, will likely incorporate components that use metasurface optics, according to Andrei Faraon, professor of applied physics in Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science.

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.

Synthetic Microorganisms Allow Scientists to Study Ancient Evolutionary Mysteries in the Laboratory

Scientists at Scripps Research and their collaborators have created microorganisms that may recapitulate key features of organisms thought to have lived billions of years ago, allowing them to explore questions about how life evolved from inanimate molecules to single-celled organisms to the complex, multicellular lifeforms we see today.

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.