Applications are currently being accepted for the Summer 2023 term of two undergraduate internship programs offered by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science: the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program and the Community College Internships (CCI) program. The application deadline is January 10, 2023, at 5:00 p.m. EST.
Applications are currently being accepted for the Summer 2023 term of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science’s Visiting Faculty Program (VFP). The application deadline is January 10, 2023, at 5:00 p.m. ET.
Electrochemical reduction can convert carbon dioxide into multicarbon products for use as a raw material in chemicals and fuels. In this research, scientists improved this conversion process by using a tandem catalyst electrode. The electrode includes a silver or iron-nitrogen-carbon-based catalyst to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and incorporates a second segment that contains a copper catalyst to convert carbon monoxide into multicarbon products. Relative to prior methods, the developed approach more selectively converts carbon dioxide into desired compounds.
Scientists use high-energy protons to create isotopes for cancer treatment. In space, such protons pose a risk to astronauts and spacecraft. To learn more about both the risks from these protons and about methods of using these protons to produce medical isotopes, scientists measured the cross sections (probabilities) for high-energy proton reactions used to produce radiopharmaceuticals. The research helps to optimize the quantity and purity of medical isotopes and improve the design of spacecraft shielding.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded $47 million to U.S. scientists conducting experimental research in fusion energy science at tokamak and spherical tokamak facilities in the U.S. and around the globe. The awards support research that aims to close gaps in the science and technology basis for the tokamak approach to fusion energy. These awards will help support the Biden Administration’s decadal vision to accelerate fusion as a clean energy technology.
In a new experiment, scientists have finally found the long-sought tetraneutron predicted using theory and supercomputer support at least six years ago. The tetraneutron is a combination of four neutrally charged neutrons. Unlike individual neutrons and combinations of two or three neutrons, the tetraneutron has a stable state—called a resonant state—that is long enough to be determined by the new experiment. The results are an important advance for nuclear physics and understanding of the strong nuclear force.
Daniel Hayes is an associate professor in ecosystem science at the University of Maine. His Early Career Award allowed him to collaborate with scientists around the world to study the impacts of thawing permafrost, using field measurements, remote observations, and simulation modeling.
Researchers attach green fluorescent protein (GFP), a protein that changes light from one color into another, to other proteins to observe how and where cells produce those proteins and thus how cells express genes. However, the use of GFP is time consuming and requires expensive equipment. Researchers have now designed and developed a special type of GFP visible with the unaided eye and a simple black light.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $6.4 million in funding for three initial Department of Energy national lab-led team projects in artificial intelligence research for high energy physics. These awards support the DOE Office of Science (SC) initiative in artificial intelligence research to use AI techniques to deliver scientific discoveries that would not otherwise be possible and to broaden participation in high energy physics research.
Scientists have previously shown that superparameterized (SP) climate models are better able to simulate clouds than other models. However, scientists must still determine how to represent the small-scale processes—called microphysics—that govern cloud droplets and ice crystals. This study examined how choices of microphysics processes affect how SP models predict extreme precipitation.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced an up to $400 million funding opportunity for basic research in support of DOE’s clean energy, economic, and national security goals. The funding will advance the priorities of DOE’s Office of Science and its major programs, including Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, Isotope R&D and Production, and Accelerator R&D and Production. This funding opportunity will help achieve the Biden Administration’s plan to employ science and innovation to tackle our greatest challenges.
Scientists recently tested the ability of three techniques called entanglement witnesses to accurately identify pairs of entangled magnetic particles. Of the three, quantum Fisher information (QFI) performed best, routinely locating entanglement in complex materials. This work is the most thorough examination of QFI’s capabilities to date and is the first to apply QFI to massive solid materials.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science has selected 44 graduate students representing 24 states for the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program’s 2022 Solicitation 1 cycle. Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE National Laboratories, SCGSR prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission and secures our national position at the forefront of discovery and innovation.
The quarks and gluons in a proton and their interaction determine the proton’s structure. This structure deforms when exposed to external electric and magnetic (EM) fields, a phenomenon known as polarizability. Scientists use Effective Field Theories (EFTs) to link the description of neutron structure and polarizability to theories of the strong neutron force. In this research, scientists validated EFTs using proton Compton scattering.
Physicists have observed a narrow proton-decaying resonance in beryllium-11. This result supports evidence that the beta-delayed proton decay of beryllium-11 is a sequential two-step process where a near-threshold resonance in beryllium-11 is populated first in a beta decay with a subsequent proton emission.
Subsurface permeability is a key parameter of subsurface flow and transport processes in watersheds, but it is difficult and expensive to measure directly at the scale and resolution required by watershed models. This study used deep learning to accurately estimate the subsurface permeability of a watershed using widely available stream discharge data.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $56 million in funding for four projects in fundamental mathematics research on problems of interest to DOE that require the integration of multiple mathematical topic areas.
Victor M. Zavala, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a computational mathematician in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, is developing scalable algorithms and software to handle the nation’s energy infrastructure challenges.
Nuclear physicists have experimentally confirmed the existence of the tetraneutron, a meta-stable nuclear system that can decay into four free neutrons. Researchers have predicted the tetraneutron’s existence since 2016. The new results, which agree with predictions from supercomputer simulations, will help scientists understand atomic nuclei, neutron stars, and other neutron-rich systems.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to $50 million to launch a new milestone-based fusion development program as authorized in the Energy Act of 2020. This program will support for-profit entities, who may team with national laboratories, universities, and others to meet major technical and commercialization milestones toward the successful design of a fusion pilot plant (FPP) that will help bring fusion toward technical and commercial viability. The program is informed by recent reports from the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; community workshops; and input from private industry.
Understanding how protons and neutrons are distributed in nuclei can reveal how large those nucleons appear when probed at high energy and contribute to understanding of their constituent quarks and gluons. This work used comparisons between model calculations and new precision data from collisions of heavy ions to access the distribution of gluons and predict the size of the proton. This knowledge can eliminate significant uncertainties about the initial state of the quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $30 million in funding for five projects in computation and simulation techniques and tools to understand the universe via collaborations that enable effective use of DOE high-performance computers. The Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) partnership in high energy physics brings together applied mathematicians and computer scientists with physicists to deliver scientific discoveries that would not be possible without advanced high-performance computers (HPCs).
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $8.5 million in funding for basic research in the development of randomized algorithms for understanding and improving the properties and behavior of complex energy systems. Problems involving the design of scientific experiments or energy and communication infrastructures can often be viewed as a discrete, networked system of systems that needs to be optimized. Such discrete optimization problems cannot be efficiently solved with conventional algorithms that are not well-suited for graphs, networks, and streaming data.
The role of microbes in the carbon cycle is likely to shift as microbial communities respond to environmental shocks such as drought and wildfire. This research studied how depth below the ground surface affects bacterial communities’ resistance to these shocks. It found that bacterial communities closer to the soil surface were more sensitive to drought and fire, suggesting that deeper soils may serve as a refuge.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $15 million in funding for basic research to explore potentially high-impact approaches in scientific computing and extreme-scale science. The projects will address disruptive technology changes from emerging trends in high-end computing, massive datasets, artificial intelligence, and increasingly heterogeneous architectures such as neuromorphic and quantum computing systems.
Researchers have created a new intrinsic ferromagnetic topological insulator consisting of layers of manganese, bismuth, and tellurium atoms. The material requires no external magnetic field to study its unique properties, providing opportunities to explore novel phases of matter and the basic science of quantum material and to develop new technologies.
To simulate stellar novae accurately on computers, researchers need accurate inputs for nuclear reaction rates. Nuclear physicists have now determined an important and challenging proton-capture reaction rate using laboratory experiments. A state-of-the-art nova simulation incorporates the new experimental information, allowing physicists to compare the results for comparison to actual nova observations.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $178 million for bioenergy research to advance sustainable technology breakthroughs that can improve public, health, help address climate change, improve food and agricultural production, and create more resilient supply chains. This funding will support cutting-edge biotechnology R&D of bioenergy crops, industrial microorganisms, and microbiomes. Alternative clean energy sources like bioenergy are playing a key role in reaching President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy by 2050.
The equations of quantum mechanics require too much computer time and power when used to predict behavior in large systems. Researchers have now shown that machine learning models can mimic the basic structure from first principles, which can be very difficult to simulate directly. The result is predictions that are easy to compute and are accurate in a wide range of chemical systems.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $21 million in funding for 29 new projects through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). By coupling innovative ideas from EPSCoR-eligible institutions with leading-edge capabilities at the DOE national laboratories, the grants are aimed to enhance the research of EPSCoR investigators while building expertise and capabilities that will enable the institutions to compete more successfully for other federal R&D funding. In this way, the DOE EPSCoR program advances the geographic diversity of researchers conducting competitive energy-related research.
A charge stripper is an important component in the process the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) uses to create rare isotopes for scientific research. However, FRIB’s particle beam is too powerful for a conventional charge stripper. Researchers developed a new liquid-lithium charge stripper that can produce as high a charge state as a conventional solid charge stripper and last indefinitely.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Science has launched the Urban Integrated Field Laboratories (Urban IFL) initiative. Recently, we announced $66 million in awards to establish three new Urban IFLs that will focus on improving our understanding of urban systems. They will also expand our knowledge of how those systems and the climate interact with each other. One field laboratory is in Chicago, one is in Baltimore, and one is on the Texas Gulf Coast.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $66 million in funding for three projects, together involving over 20 institutions, that will develop Urban Integrated Field Laboratories (Urban IFLs) in Baltimore, MD, Chicago, IL, and the Texas Gulf Coast.
Scientists have long theorized that carbon-12 could form in stars in the “Hoyle state,” an excited form of carbon-12, then decay through the fusing of three alpha particles to form ground state carbon and energy. Researchers have now tested the role of neutron upscattering in the fusing of the alpha particles. The results indicate that upscattering plays a less important role in the formation of carbon in stars than originally thought.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $35 million for three joint projects in Nuclear Physics (NP) and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) via a partnership program of Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC).
To better understand how thermoelectric devices convert thermal energy into electricity at the atomic scale, researchers used neutrons to study single crystals of tin sulfide and tin selenide. The results revealed a strong correlation between changes in the structure at certain temperatures and the frequency of atomic vibrations (phonons). This allowed the researchers to identify temperatures ideal for energy conversion and provided basic scientific knowledge for designing new thermoelectric materials.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $23.9 million in funding for ten projects in advanced scientific data management and visualization.
Colliding atomic nuclei at very high energies “melts” the boundaries of individual protons and neutrons, setting quarks and gluons to form a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Quarks or gluons in the colliding ions sometimes scatter off one another and then split, forming parallel sprays of particles called jets. Tracking how jets lose energy, called “quenching,” allows scientists to learn about the QGP and the nuclear strong force. New results find that some quarks lose energy even before they split to form a jet.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $5 million in funding for research to advance the development of tools that effectively use real-world data—disparate data that is often difficult to readily integrate—into new models (e.g., epidemiology or therapeutic development) in support of bio-preparedness and response studies.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $70 million in funding for seven projects that will improve climate prediction and aid in the fight against climate change. The research will be used to accelerate development of DOE’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), enabling scientific discovery through collaborations between climate scientists, computer scientists, and applied mathematicians. Data from this model will enhance scientists’ understanding of climate change, which will be crucial to furthering President Biden’s commitment to tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad.
Garret Suen is an associate professor of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, who is researching how herbivores use the microbes in their stomachs to break down cellulose into smaller molecules that can be converted into biofuels and bioproducts.
Atoms in magnetic materials are organized into regions called magnetic domains. Within each domain, the electrons have spins that point in the same direction. Researchers have developed a magnetic material whose thickness determines whether the walls between domains have the same or alternating spin chirality, or handedness. This study demonstrates a way to change the rotational direction and occurrence of domain wall pairs, a finding that could lead to technologies based on spintronics.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced more than $540 million in awards for university- and National Laboratory-led research into clean energy technologies and low-carbon manufacturing. Most greenhouse-gas emissions come from the production and use of energy, so building strong scientific foundations for reducing emissions across the energy lifecycle is crucial to meeting President Biden’s goal of creating a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.
A new X-ray optics device based on optical microelectromechanical systems can harness extremely fast X-ray pulses in a device orders of magnitude smaller and lighter than conventional devices used to regulate X-ray probes. The ultrafast X-ray optics could be essential for experiments on ultra-high-speed phenomena at synchrotron particle accelerators and will help researchers study fast-evolving chemical, material, and biological processes.
Metal parts made using laser-based additive manufacturing (AM) can have residual strain resulting from rapid heating and cooling during printing. Annealing parts after printing reduces the strain but can cause unwanted structural changes. Researchers used neutron diffraction and neutron imaging to measure strain and determine optimal annealing for metal AM parts.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $8 million in funding for 10 projects in Earth and environmental system modeling research. Awards will focus on further development of DOE’s flagship Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) and studies that improve the predictive understanding of the climate and Earth system.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science is pleased to announce that the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program is now accepting applications for the 2022 Solicitation 2 cycle. Applications are due 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, November 9, 2022.
Magnetic materials are essential to applications including data storage, cell phones, motors, and sensors. Researchers have synthesized a new, extremely small, thermally stable magnetic nanoparticle based on the principle of superatoms. The superatom structure groups electronic states in electron shells. This translates into a nanoparticle with high stability and a large spin magnetic moment.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $14.8 million in funding for advanced research projects in particle accelerator science and technology. Particle accelerators provide unique sources of light and particles that support the research of thousands of scientists worldwide, play a direct role in the production of more than $500 billion of goods annually, and treat more than 5 million cancer patients each year.
New investigations have produced a simpler model to elegantly explain previously observed behaviors for free carrier generation in organic solar cells. The model relies on well-established scientific descriptors, Marcus theory and entropy. Previous descriptions proposed new physical phenomena, but a new, simplified model provides a unified platform for understanding processes in both solution and solid-phase systems for organic photochemical conversion.
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