News By Location

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and the Technical University of Munich have developed a new technique that allows researchers to synthesize a perovskite solar material, characterize its crystal structure, and test its response to light at the same time.

Aditya Sood, a research scientist with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has received the 2021 LCLS Young Investigator Award for his work combining materials science with ultrafast physics. The award celebrates early-career scientists who perform noteworthy research using SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser.

Spawned by the spins of electrons in magnetic materials, these tiny whirlpools behave like independent particles and could be the future of computing. Experiments with SLAC’s X-ray laser are revealing their secrets.

More than half a century after the Woodward-Hoffmann rules, an important set of organic chemistry rules, were formulated, SLAC scientists imaged a reaction and observed how a molecule transforms as predicted by these rules, directly confirming the theory for the first time.

Researchers from the Lab’s Center for Novel Pathways to Quantum Coherence in Materials are developing new pathways to create and protect quantum coherence. Doing so will enable exquisitely sensitive measurement and information processing devices that function at ambient or even extreme conditions.

A Q&A with Berkeley Lab scientists on how hydrogen can help achieve net-zero emissions. Adam Weber is Berkeley Lab's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Program Manager and leads Berkeley Lab’s Energy Conversion Group (ECG), and Ahmet Kusoglu is a staff scientist in the ECG, a multidisciplinary team of electrochemists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, theorists, and material scientists with active collaborations across industry, academia, and national laboratories.

Some devastating diseases, like Alzheimer's and autoimmune conditions, are hard to diagnose correctly because doctors don’t yet know what genes or molecules to look for. But this new technique inspired by the Star Trek tricorder can spot disease without the clues, using infrared light and machine learning.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have uncovered a key step in the ionization of liquid water using the lab’s high-speed “electron camera,” MeV-UED. This reaction is of fundamental significance to a wide range of fields, including nuclear engineering, space travel, cancer treatment and environmental remediation. Their results were published in Science today.

Having good room ventilation to dilute and disperse indoor air pollutants has long been recognized, and with the COVID-19 pandemic its importance has become all the more heightened. But new experiments by Berkeley Lab indoor air researchers show that certain circumstances will result in poor mixing of room air, meaning airborne contaminants may not be effectively dispersed and removed by building level ventilation.