News Releases

Researchers carefully positioned lasers to compress billions of electrons together, creating a beam five times more powerful than ever before.

Scientists encased nanodiamonds in tiny moving droplets of water to improve quantum sensing. The new technique lets researchers detect trace amounts of certain ions and molecules, and could someday find applications in environmental monitoring, medicine, bioengineering, and more.

Working at nanoscale dimensions, billionths of a meter in size, a team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory revealed a new way to measure high-speed fluctuations in magnetic materials. Knowledge obtained by these new measurements, published in Nano Letters, could be used to advance technologies ranging from traditional computing to the emerging field of quantum computing.

Data scientists and developers at Jefferson Lab are exploring some of the latest artificial intelligence techniques to help make high-performance computers more reliable and less costly to run. The study deploys machine learning models that are trained to monitor and predict the behavior of a scientific computing cluster. The goal is to help system administrators quickly identify and respond to troublesome computing jobs or hardware behavior, reducing downtime for scientists processing data from their experiments.

Using the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers have developed a new technique that predicts nuclear properties in record detail. The study revealed how the structure of a nucleus relates to the force that holds it together. This understanding could advance efforts in quantum physics and across a variety of sectors, from to energy production to national security.

Researchers have developed a new optical computing material from photon avalanching nanoparticles.

New research offers insights that could help reduce the amount of radioactive tritium embedded in the walls of fusion vessels to a minimum.

SSRL scientists have figured out how platinum electrodes dissolve, potentially paving the way for renewable energy improvements.

It may be the smallest, shortest chorus dance ever recorded. 

As reported in Science Advances, an international team of researchers observed how electrons, excited by ultrafast light pulses, danced in unison around a particle less than a nanometer in diameter. Researchers measured this dance with unprecedented precision, achieving the first measurement of its kind at the sub-nanometer scale. 

The synchronized dance of electrons, known as plasmonic resonance, can confine light for brief periods of time. That light-trapping ability has been applied in a wide range of areas, from turning light into chemical energy to improving light-sensitive gadgets and even converting sunlight into electricity. While they’ve been studied extensively in systems from several centimeters across to those just 10 nanometers wide, this is the first time researchers were able to break the field’s “nanometer barrier.”

Using a novel surface-sensitive spectroscopy method, scientists explored atomic vibrations in crystalline material surfaces near interfaces. The findings illuminate quantum behaviors that play important roles computing and sensing technologies.