To form, cloud droplets need aerosol particles and humidity in the atmosphere. Scientists previously believed cloud droplets formed only when the humidity rose above 100%. Now, new research found that if the humidity falls below 100%, the primary driver of cloud formation involves small changes in humidity caused by turbulence.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $105 million in funding for small businesses to pursue the deployment of clean energy technologies, as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to building a clean energy economy and achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced plans to provide $10 million for new grants to universities, academic institutions, federal research labs, and nonprofits, within the area of Environmental System Science (ESS) research.
Jacqueline Chen harnesses some of the nation’s most powerful computers to model the complex interactions in combustion engines. Her research illustrates how much our computing power and understanding of these processes has evolved over decades of work.
Researchers performed the world’s first measurement of how the size of the radium nucleus modifies the structure of molecules containing different radium isotopes. Violations of fundamental symmetries help explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. Radioactive molecules containing isotopes of heavy elements like radium are ideal for studying violation of fundamental symmetries.
Impurities in the plasmas in tokamaks can reduce performance. These impurities are from interactions between the hot plasma and tungsten tokamak walls. This experiment found that tokamak magnetic fields that rotate clockwise direction can remove these impurities. This is the opposite direction from normal and the same direction the plasma current moves.
College of William and Mary associate professor and Jefferson Lab staff scientist Jozef Dudek focused on a previously unexplored, numerical approach to study unstable hadrons and pioneered theoretical techniques to find answers.
Researchers have discovered a hard-to-observe type of spin called Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) in a quantum mechanical system. Their findings demonstrate that KPZ motion accurately describes the changes in time of spin chains—linear channels of spins that interact with one another—in certain quantum materials. This could eventually be harnessed for real-world applications such as heat transport and spintronics.
Scientists have synthesized and examined the magnetic fields of tetrafluoride powders of four radioactive elements—thorium, uranium, neptunium, and plutonium. These are actinides, a series of heavy and radioactive elements. This study presents a new way of mapping the distinctive evolution of electronic structure in actinides. This will help researchers develop future nuclear fuels, superconductors, and other materials.
Registration has now opened for the 32nd National Science Bowl (NSB), hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Thousands of students compete in the contest annually as it has grown into one of the largest, academic math and science competitions in the country.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to $400 million in funding for a range of research opportunities to support DOE’s clean energy, economic, and national security goals.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced plans to provide $14 million for new grants to universities, other academic institutions, non-profit organizations, for-profit organizations, and other federal agencies within the area of Atmospheric System Research (ASR).
The Department of Energy (DOE) announced three DOE National Laboratory scientists as DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellows. This honor, authorized by the America COMPETES Act, is bestowed on National Laboratory scientists with outstanding records of achievement and provides each Fellow with $1 million over three years to support activities that develop, sustain, and promote scientific and academic excellence in DOE Office of Science research.
Ken Andersen is the associate laboratory director of the Spallation Neutron Source and the High Flux Isotope Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This is a continuing profile series on the directors of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facilities. These scientists lead a variety of research institutions that provide researchers with the most advanced tools of modern science.
The Compact Advanced Tokamak (CAT) concept uses physics models to show that by carefully shaping the plasma and the distribution of current in the plasma, fusion plant operators can suppress turbulent eddies in the plasma. This would reduce heat loss and allow more efficient reactor operation. This advance could help achieve self-sustaining plasma and smaller, less expensive power plants.
When medical isotopes are used to treat diseases, they emit large amounts of energy that makes it hard to keep them near the target cells. Researchers are now testing a way to enclose isotopes in tiny pieces of biodegradable material that will keep the isotopes at treatment sites, ensuring that their energy can kill diseased cells with little effect on surrounding cells.
When compounds in spent nuclear fuel break down, they can release radioactive elements into the ground and water. Scientists know that one fuel compound, neptunium dioxide, reacts with water, but they do not fully understand the process. This new study found that neptunium tends to dissolve where grains of the material come together, and larger grains are less likely to dissolve.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $1 million for a one-year collaborative research project to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms for biomedical, personal healthcare, or other privacy-sensitive datasets.
To map the structures in the universe, Anže Slosar scaled up Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey data. He uses light from very distant cosmic objects called quasars as a backlight to illuminate the structure in the universe in front of them.
Researchers are using smaller tokamaks and computer models to test approaches for suppressing runaway electrons in plasmas. This research used measurements and modeling to demonstrate that perturbations to the magnetic field in a tokamak fusion plasma can suppress high-energy runaway electrons. The results could help improve the operation of ITER and other future fusion devices.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $16 million for five collaborative research projects to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms for enabling scientific insights and discoveries from data generated by computational simulations, experiments, and observations.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced it is accepting proposals for the 2022 DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program to support the research of outstanding scientists early in their careers.
New evidence suggests protons and neutrons go through a “first-order” phase transition to reach their melted state, a soup of quarks and gluons. This is a kind of stop-and-go change in temperature is similar to how ice melts: energy first increases the temperature.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $7.6 million to support nine frontier plasma science projects at five different DOE National Laboratories.
Critical materials are essential for many key technologies, including batteries and wind turbines. The Department of Energy is working to reduce the need for them, recycle them, and expand domestic sources of them.
Protons and neutrons orbit atomic nuclei in shells with caps on how many protons or neutrons they can hold. Full shells mean stable, compact nuclei. Physicists call the number of protons or neutrons in a “magic” numbered full shell. New research shows that a previously reported “magicity” for number 32 does not appear in neutron-rich potassium isotopes.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $13.7 million in funding for nine research projects that will advance the state of the art in computer science and applied mathematics.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $30 million in funding for 13 national lab and university-led research projects to develop new technologies that will help secure the supply of critical materials that build clean energy technologies.
In a conventional tokamak, the cross-section of the plasma is shaped like the letter D. Facing the straight part of the D on the inside side of the donut-shaped tokamak is called positive triangularity. New research suggests that reversing the plasma—negative triangularity--reduces how much the plasma interacts with the surfaces of the tokamak for reduced wear.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $26 million in funding to harness cutting-edge research tools for new scientific discoveries fundamental to clean energy solutions.
To reduce the need for computer power, researchers typically simulate how quarks combine to make up larger particles by simulating quarks heavier than quarks found in nature. Now, using the Summit supercomputer, a team simulated much lighter quarks than possible in the past. This produced more realistic results that will help scientists investigate the Higgs boson.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $17.5 million in funding for advanced research projects in particle accelerator science and technology as well as university-based traineeships that will build a diverse, skilled pipeline of American scientists and engineers in the fields of high energy physics accelerators and instrumentation.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced nearly $54 million for 10 new projects led by DOE’s National Laboratories to increase energy efficiency in microelectronics design and production.
In modern optoelectronic devices, performance depends in part on the movement of excitons. Researchers have now created a new perovskite nanocrystal system and taken direct visualizations of the movement of an exciton from crystal to crystal over a record 200 nanometers, much longer than the previous record. This paves the way for new commercial application.
The “superheavy” elements are found only in labs. The small amounts of material available means chemists must use special techniques to study them. This research developed a new way to study the chemistry of metallic elements with extremely low concentrations of material. This may lead to better methods of recovering iridium, an element that is critical to national security and the economy.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $2.8 million for six research projects to develop faster and more efficient ways to apply high-performance computing for scientific discoveries.
Protons inside the nucleus cling to neighboring protons and neutrons. However, it may be possible to knock out protons so that they interact less with nearby particles as they exit the nucleus, a phenomenon called color transparency. Physicists have observed color transparency in two-quark particles. But physicists hunting for signs of color transparency in protons in a more complicated three-quark system recently came up empty handed.
Scientists have developed a technique called plasmon engineering to create nanomaterials with near-atomic scale control of patterning in silicon. This new research used a specific plasmon engineering method, aberration-corrected electron beam lithography, to control the optical and electronic properties of silicon. This approach could one day be applied to industrial applications.
Scientists demonstrated that ultrathin films of samarium nickel oxide can mask the thermal radiation emitted by hot materials. This is due to the material undergoing a gradual transition from insulator to conductor. This study shows that quantum materials such as samarium nickel oxide can manage thermal radiation with potential applications in infrared camouflage, privacy shielding, and heat transfer control.
In support of the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to build the American economy back better, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced a plan to provide $37 million for small businesses pursuing climate and energy research and development (R&D) projects as well the development of advanced scientific instrumentation through a funding opportunity announcement (FOA).
At North Carolina State University, associate professor James Kneller studies neutrinos emitted from exploding stars.
Scientists have learned how to place crystalline defects in new materials with atomic-scale precision. This enables materials that can control excitons—energy carriers similar to subatomic particles. New research reveals how to create local energy wells that “capture” the excitons. This small but important step could lead to smaller, more efficient components for optical telecommunications.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $15.1 million for three collaborative research projects, at five universities, to advance the development of a flexible multi-tiered data and computational infrastructure to support a diverse collection of on-demand scientific data processing tasks and computationally intensive simulations.
Researchers have for the first time used a quantum computer to generate accurate results from materials science simulations that can be verified with practical techniques. Eventually, such simulations on quantum computers could be more accurate and complex than simulations on classical digital computers.
New research paves the way to a systematic way to design quantum algorithms that outperform conventional algorithms. The research involves logic gates, the fundamental building blocks of conventional digital computing and quantum computing systems. This new research is the first attempt to determine the number of logic gates that quantum states need to process information.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science announced a plan to provide $100 million over the next four years for university-based research on a range of high energy physics topics through a new funding opportunity announcement (FOA).
Chemists create catalysts for use in industry and other applications. One of the methods to create these catalysts is by using light to break down organometallic compounds, a process called photodissociation. This study used ultrafast infrared spectroscopy to study how ultraviolet light photodissociates gas phase iron pentacarbonyl. These insights may help scientists design new photocatalysts.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $7.7 million in funding for 11 studies to improve understanding of Earth system predictability and DOE’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), a state-of-the-science climate model.
Today, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (SC) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced $9.35 million for 21 research projects in High-Energy Density Laboratory Plasmas (HEDLP).
Supported by his Early Career Research Program Award, University of Wisconsin – Madison professor Michael S. Arnold found new ways to make graphene nanostructures with smooth edges. This technology will enable next-generation energy and electronics applications.
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right