Feature Articles

The Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has reached a major milestone: It now stores more than 300 petabytes of data. This is the largest tape archive in the U.S. for data from nuclear and particle physics (NPP) experiments, and third in terms of scientific data overall.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory is home to several state-of-the-art user facilities that are key in basic research and scientific discovery. This summer, 13 students had the unique opportunity to carry out a research project across three of them: the Tandem Van de Graaff facility, Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), and National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II).

iaoqian Chen, a physicist and beamline scientist at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been selected as one of the 91 early career scientists from across the country to receive research funding through the DOE Office of Science’s Early Career Research Program.

Steve Farrell, a research associate at the Inner-Shell Spectroscopy (ISS) beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, has recently been selected as one of 2024’s Distinguished Goldhaber Fellows. Farrell is eager to use this time to pursue projects focused on clean, affordable energy that leverage his experience and expertise in chemistry and materials science.

What populates Alabama’s William Bankhead National Forest? Trees might be the first thing that come to mind — or maybe deer. But a lot of sophisticated scientific instruments are joining the natural forest occupants thanks to a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research facility being set up there to study connections between the forest and atmosphere. But before these sensitive tools are installed among the trees, staff from DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility need to ensure the instruments’ precision and accuracy. 

As a summer science writing intern in the Media and Communications Office at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, I learned about neutrinos while writing about Mary Bishai, an award-winning neutrino scientist. I attended neutrino lectures by Brookhaven physicists Elizabeth Worcester and Jay Hyun Jo, and I toured a laboratory where “cold microelectronics” designed to detect elusive signals of neutrinos get dipped in liquid nitrogen to ensure they are up to their chilly assignment.

Scientists from Yale University and Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a systematic approach to understanding how energy is lost from the materials that make up qubits. Energy loss inhibits the performance of these quantum computer building blocks, so determining its sources — and adjusting the materials as necessary — can help bring researchers closer to designing quantum computers that could revolutionize several scientific fields. With their new approach, the Yale scientists were able to design a compact device that could store quantum information for more than one millisecond.

Twenty high school juniors and seniors recently spent two weeks at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory learning how scientists play key roles in developing cleaner, renewable energy sources.  

Esther Sans Takeuchi, a materials scientist and chemical engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, was honored by the Journal of Physical Chemistry C in a special Festschrift issue earlier this year.

What do a particle collider and a human have in common? Not much. But both have parts that need to be kept within a certain temperature range to function properly. It’s a phenomenon mechanical engineer Thea Vijaya Kumar knows well. She designs systems to keep people and machines cool — a cool job in every sense of the word. Her current focus is on meeting that goal, and how to do it efficiently, for the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).