Feature Articles

At the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists use artificial intelligence, or AI, to accelerate the discovery and development of materials for energy and information technologies.

Nuclear physicist Caroline Nesaraja of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory evaluates nuclear data vital to applied and basic sciences. Her work ensures that the scientific community has the best nuclear data for fundamental research and applications including medical isotopes, nuclear energy and national and international security.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee developed an automated workflow to speed the search for new materials to advance solar energy technologies.

A team of researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, along with colleagues at Purdue University, has taken an important step toward a quantum communications milestone by harnessing the frequency, or color, of light.

Physicists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a measurement technique to better understand beam loss--stray particles that travel outside the confinement fields of a particle accelerator. Mitigating beam loss is paramount to realizing more powerful accelerators at smaller scales and lower costs.

A team at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used two DOE supercomputers, together with a machine learning program called Eureqa, to find a new extrapolation formula from existing fusion device data to the future the ITER device. The team then completed new simulations that confirm their previous ones, which showed that in full-power ITER, the component that removes exhaust heat may be more likely to maintain its integrity than was predicted by the current trend.

The U.S. Air Force and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new high-performance weather forecasting computer system that will provide a platform for some of the most advanced weather modeling in the world.

Using the nation's fastest supercomputer, Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a team of nuclear physicists developed a promising method for measuring quark interactions in hadrons and applied the method to simulations using quarks with close-to-physical masses.

To investigate what happens inside cells when they are at risk of becoming cancerous, scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have been using neutron scattering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team is searching to better understand the altered state of the nucleolus--a membrane-less organelle inside the cell--when the cell is compromised. Novel insights into cell behavior at the atomic and molecular scales will enable better detection and treatment of cancer in its many forms.

As Hurricane Dorian raged through the Bahamas, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory worked around the clock to aid recovery efforts for one of the Caribbean's worst storms ever, providing geographic data that guided decisions on everything from where to open emergency shelters to how to staff first-aid centers.