Feature Articles

Sandia Labs Experimental Impact Mechanics Lab packs a world-class punch in 200-plus square feet of weights, rods, cables, bars, heaters, compressors and high-speed cameras.

Artificial intelligence is being called "the next generation of the way we do science." At Argonne, researchers are leveraging the lab's state-of-the-art-facilities and unparalleled expertise to shape the very future of science.

The Digital Twins for Hydropower framework will help the industry to affordably modernize its aging hydropower fleet.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced that the student team from North Hollywood Senior High School in North Hollywood, California won the 2021 DOE National Science Bowl® (NSB). In the middle school competition, students from Jonas Clarke Middle School in Lexington, Massachusetts took home first place earlier this month.

Supercomputer programmer Seth Johnson might be the ultimate insider at the National Science Bowl® competitions. He competed on his high school NSB team and now volunteers at the regional and national events.

A new robotics project called Argonaut at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will share that same name and spirit of adventure. Argonaut's mission will be to monitor conditions within ultracold particle detectors by voyaging into a sea of liquid argon kept at minus-193 degrees Celsius -- as cold as some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

The ICARUS detector, part of Fermilab's Short-Baseline Neutrino Program, will officially start its hunt for elusive sterile neutrinos this fall. The international collaboration led by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia successfully brought the detector online and is now collecting test data and making final improvements.

Many devices rely on rare earth elements. Disruptions to supplies have consequences. Argonne analyzed potential disruptions with a computer model called Global Critical Materials to forecast rare earth market dynamics.

A team performed simulations on the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and found that electrons in cuprates interact with phonons much more strongly than was previously thought, leading to experimentally observed "kinks," or sudden changes, in the relationship between an electron's energy and the momentum it carries.

Researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of Tennessee-Knoxville uncovered hidden and unexpected quantum behavior in a simple iron-iodide material (FeI2) discovered almost a century ago. The new insights were enabled using neutron scattering experiments and theoretical physics calculations at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team's findings solves a 40-year-old puzzle about the material's mysterious behavior and could be used as a map to unlock a treasure trove of quantum phenomena in other materials.