Science Highlights

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have demonstrated that small molecular tweaks to surfaces can improve absorption technology for direct air capture, or DAC, of carbon dioxide. 

 

Converting dinitrogen into ammonia is critical for making fertilizer. Conventional conversion processes use adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Researchers are now working on processes that instead use sunlight, which reduces energy use and greenhouse gas production relative to the ATP process. In this research, scientists created a unique biohybrid that couples nanocrystals to nitrogen-catalyzing enzymes to produce ammonia using sunlight.

The collision of neutron stars creates an enigmatic object called a remnant. These remnants can, but don’t always, collapse into a black hole. This research used supercomputer simulations to examine the internal structure of these remnants and their cooling process, primarily through neutrino emissions, and what that means for black hole formation.

Neutrinos can change their identities or “flavors” when they interact. Researchers recently found that the neutrinos in a very dense environment such as a core collapse supernova can develop strong correlations through mutual interactions. This means that over time, neutrinos with different initial flavors reach a similar equilibrium flavor and energy distribution.

Fuel density in fusion tokamak devices has historically been constrained by limits in device design. Now, however, researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have for the first time gone beyond these density limits while simultaneously maintaining high confinement quality. These conditions have in the past been mutually exclusive. The result points to a possible solution for a common challenge for tokamak devices.

In cuprate materials, superconductivity competes with magnetic spin and electric charge density wave (CDW) order in the material’s electrons. In some of these materials, strong magnetic interaction causes spin density waves (SDW) and CDWs to lock together to form a stable long-range “stripe state” where the peaks and valleys of the two waves are aligned. This stripe state competes with and interrupts the superconducting phase, but the new research found that short-range CDW can be compatible with superconductivity.

The world’s fastest supercomputer helped researchers simulate synthesizing a material harder and tougher than a diamond — or any other substance on Earth. The study used Frontier to predict the likeliest strategy to synthesize such a material, thought to exist so far only within the interiors of giant exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system.

Scientists recreate the conditions of the early universe in collisions of atoms in particle accelerators. Measuring the resulting particles allows scientists to understand how matter formed. A new calculation determined that as much as 70% of some measured particles are from reactions later than the early universe of quark-gluon plasma.