Feature Articles

As the particle physics community releases its strategic plan for the next 10 years and overall vision for the next 20, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have started planning how the Lab is positioned to contribute to a range of the plan’s science goals, new experiments, proposed research facilities, and ongoing projects.

Argonne researchers have invented a cathode material that replaces lithium with sodium ions and would be significantly cheaper. Sodium is far more naturally abundant and easily mined than lithium and is thus an attractive option for electric vehicles.

Scientists at ORNL have developed a technique for recovering and recycling critical materials that has garnered special recognition from a peer-reviewed materials journal and received a new phase of funding for research and development.

The Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage has been growing, building, and working hard every year to support their mission—building the tools necessary to create scalable, distributed, and fault-tolerant quantum computer systems. Here are some of this year's highlights.

Andrew Broadbent, an accomplished project manager at the at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, took on such a challenge earlier this year though DOE’s Project Leadership Institute (PLI) and emerged from the yearlong endeavor with his team victorious.

Now in its twentieth year, the Hydrogen Safety Panel is led by PNNL and includes more than two dozen experts. These experts developed a trusted resource for best practices for hydrogen energy.

Argonne National Laboratory’s Theta supercomputer will be retired at the end of 2023, ending a productive run of enabling scientific breakthroughs in areas ranging from materials discovery to supernova simulations.

A team of computational scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has generated and released datasets of unprecedented scale that provide the ultraviolet visible spectral properties of over 10 million organic molecules. Understanding how a molecule interacts with light is essential to uncovering its electronic and optical properties, which in turn have potential photoactive applications in products such as solar cells or medical imaging systems. 

After several years starting a company to produce a unique solvent-free battery component for manufacturing, Rajan Kumar joined Innovation Crossroads at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to build his entrepreneurial skills.