News Releases

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have shown that particles produced in collimated sprays called jets retain information about their origins in subatomic particle smashups.

Researchers have determined that six gas valves provide the best protection against plasma disruptions in SPARC, a next-generation, experimental fusion system. By refining the setup for the fusion vessel’s massive gas injection system, researchers are ensuring that disruptions — sudden jets of plasma that can damage the fusion vessel’s inner walls — are controlled efficiently, paving the way for safer, more robust fusion power plants.

Researchers have discovered that phasons, low-temperature quasiparticles found in crystal lattices, enable interlayer excitons to move at very low temperatures, when motion should stop. In addition to contributing to foundational materials science knowledge, this discovery could help improve the stability of quantum technologies, such as using excitons as qubits.

Scientists are exploring how web search engine technology might also keep the lights on, the water running and the trains moving.

Physicists have created a new computer code that could speed up the design of the complicated magnets that shape the plasma in stellarators, making the systems simpler and more affordable to build.

Scientists have discovered “berkelocene,” the first organometallic molecule to be characterized containing the heavy element berkelium. The breakthrough disrupts long-held theories about the chemistry of the elements that follow uranium in the periodic table. 

A new study led by researchers at Berkeley Lab outlines a way to engineer pseudo-bonds in materials. Instead of forming chemical bonds, which is what makes epoxies and other composites so tough, the chains of molecules entangle in a way that is fully reversible.

Scientists encased nanodiamonds in tiny moving droplets of water to improve quantum sensing. The new technique lets researchers detect trace amounts of certain ions and molecules, and could someday find applications in environmental monitoring, medicine, bioengineering, and more.

Working at nanoscale dimensions, billionths of a meter in size, a team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory revealed a new way to measure high-speed fluctuations in magnetic materials. Knowledge obtained by these new measurements, published in Nano Letters, could be used to advance technologies ranging from traditional computing to the emerging field of quantum computing.

Data scientists and developers at Jefferson Lab are exploring some of the latest artificial intelligence techniques to help make high-performance computers more reliable and less costly to run. The study deploys machine learning models that are trained to monitor and predict the behavior of a scientific computing cluster. The goal is to help system administrators quickly identify and respond to troublesome computing jobs or hardware behavior, reducing downtime for scientists processing data from their experiments.