News Releases

Over the past three years, a team of researchers from Sandia National Laboratories has been pioneering an environmentally friendly method to separate critical rare-earth elements from watery mixtures.

PPPL scientists have observed new details of how plasma interacts with magnetic fields, potentially providing insight into the formation of enormous plasma jets that stretch between the stars.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborating institutions have engineered a highly selective catalyst that can convert methane, a major component of natural gas, into methanol, an easily transportable liquid fuel, in a single, one-step reaction. As described in a paper just published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, this direct process for methane-to-methanol conversion runs at a temperature lower than required to make tea and exclusively produces methanol without additional byproducts.

Scientists studying the tracks of particles streaming from six billion collisions of atomic nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) — an “atom smasher” that recreates the conditions of the early universe — have discovered a new kind of antimatter nucleus, the heaviest ever detected. Composed of four antimatter particles — an antiproton, two antineutrons, and one antihyperon — these exotic antinuclei are known as antihyperhydrogen-4.

A team of scientists led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was recently able to observe how promethium forms chemical bonds when placed in an aqueous solution.

New fusion simulations of the inside of a tokamak reveal the ideal spot for a “cave” with flowing liquid lithium is near the bottom by the center stack, as the evaporating metal particles should land in just the right spot to dissipate excess heat from the plasma.

For the first time, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have used silicon photonic microchip components to perform a quantum sensing technique called atom interferometry, an ultra-precise way of measuring acceleration. It is the latest milestone toward developing a kind of quantum compass for navigation when GPS signals are unavailable.