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What could smaller particle accelerators look like in the future? SLAC scientists are working on innovations that could give more researchers access to accelerator science.

Long before researchers discovered the electron and its role in generating electrical current, they knew about electricity and were exploring its potential. One thing they learned early on was that metals were great conductors of both electricity and heat.. And in 1853, two scientists showed that those two admirable properties of metals were somehow related: At any given temperature, the ratio of electronic conductivity to thermal conductivity was roughly the same in any metal they tested. This so-called Wiedemann-Franz law has held ever since – except in quantum materials, Now, a theoretical argument put forth by physicists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and the University of Illinois suggests that the law should, in fact, approximately hold for one type of quantum material, the cuprate superconductors.

New calculations from Google DeepMind grow Berkeley Lab's Materials Project, an open-access resource that scientists use to develop new materials for future technologies. Some of the computations were used alongside data from the Materials Project to test A-Lab, a facility at Berkeley Lab where artificial intelligence guides robots in making new materials. A-Lab’s first results show that the autonomous lab can quickly discover novel materials with minimal human input.

Bio-based plastics often end up in recycling streams because they look and feel like conventional plastic, but the contamination of these compostable products makes it much harder to generate functional material out of recycled plastic. Berkeley Lab and Google X scientists have developed a biology-driven process to convert these mixtures into a new biodegradable material that can be used to make fresh products. The scientists believe the process could also enable a new field of biomanufacturing wherein valuable chemicals and even medicines are made from microbes feeding off of plastic waste.

With today’s fast and automated analysis tools, the field of biology is bursting at the seams with datasets about gene sequences and expression in the microbiomes around us – and inside us. We’re rallying the scientific community to make this wealth of data reusable across teams, so that we can advance science rather than duplicate effort.

Far from being stiff and pointy, a coronavirus’s infectious spikes are shaped like chicken drumsticks with the meaty part facing out, and the meaty part can tilt every which way on its slender stalk. A new study suggests that disabling those hinges could block infection.

A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed a high-performance coating material that self-assembles from 2D nanosheets, and which could significantly extend the shelf life of electronics, energy storage devices, health & safety products, and more. The researchers are the first to successfully scale up nanomaterial synthesis into useful materials for manufacturing and commercial applications.

The future of experimental particle physics is exciting – and energy intensive. SLAC physicists are thinking about how to make one proposal, the Cool Copper Collider, more sustainable.

The Quantum Systems Accelerator's summer camp (QCaMP) for high school students in New Mexico and California continues to evolve and grow. Under the 2023 Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) Pathway Summer School initiative, the DOE Office of Science awarded new funding to expand QCaMP's curricula and host students on-site at Berkeley Lab and Sandia Labs in 2024.