U.S. Department of Energy Research News

27-Dec-2011
Materials modeling shows big future for boron nitride nanoribbons
Alejandro Lopez-Bezanilla at Oak Ridge National Laboratory studies a proposed graphene substrate: boron nitride. Graphene, which is carbon in the form of freestanding 1-atom-thick sheets, is a natural for next-generation computer chips, communications equipment, and solar energy devices. Electrons flow through the material at an astonishing 1 million meters per second. To live up to its potential, however, graphene needs support. On its own, its edges wrinkle, tear, or roll up.

7-Dec-2011
Home sweet, energy efficient, home
Two new research facilities at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will serve as a test bed for studying energy efficient and smart homes.

5-Dec-2011
Big business and big science partner in computing to speed products to market
Jack Wells spoke about collaborative opportunities in high-performance computing at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. He highlighted pathways by which industrial users can gain access to supercomputers. Approximately 60 percent of time available on Jaguar, America's fastest supercomputer, is allocated through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, whereas 30 percent is allocated through the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge and 10 percent through Director's Discretion.

29-Nov-2011
Scientist wins energy award at technology event
Xin Zhao has won a World Technology Network award in the individual Energy category for innovative work of "the greatest likely long-term significance" in his field. Zhao designed and patented a supercapacitor that would use graphene. The invention could someday see batteries in electric vehicles and similar devices boosted or replaced by high-power, high-capacity, fast-charge/discharge energy storage systems using graphene.

17-Nov-2011
'Colony' software speeds up high-performance computing processes
As the number of processors continues to increase in leadership-class supercomputers, their ability to perform parallel computation -- doing multiple calculations simultaneously -- becomes increasingly important. The surge in machine size and complexity has led the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility computer scientists to try new and interesting strategies to keep large systems running at the highest efficiency. Their efforts have nearly tripled performance for synchronizing collective operations.

10-Nov-2011
Building block detectors for plants
While a plant's overall health can often be determined through simple observation, researchers sometimes need to see what's happening on the inside. That's where Jefferson Lab group leader Drew Weisenberger and his colleagues come in. They are working to develop tools that can image inside plants.

9-Nov-2011
Researchers show how proteins help DNA replicate past a damaged site
A multi-institutional research team led by Ivaylo Ivanov of Georgia State University has employed the Jaguar XT4 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and X-rays a billion times brighter than the sun, produced at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to illuminate how DNA replication continues past a damaged site so a lesion can be repaired later. The results appear in the Oct. 17, 2011, online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

9-Nov-2011
Farm fields could yield jet fuel of the future
NREL is helping develop a process to cost effectively convert cellulosic biomass into a replacement for petroleum-based aviation fuel.

26-Oct-2011
Berkeley Lab project in India to measure impact of pollution on cool roofs
With the aid of rooftop instruments, satellite images, an airplane and a balloon, Berkeley Lab scientists are conducting the first-ever study to determine how pollution impacts the efficacy of white roofs in cooling the planet. The yearlong project in northern India will also be the first to take physical measurements to characterize the cooling and climate effects of white roofs.

3-Oct-2011
Argonne scientist energizes quest for lost Leonardo da Vinci painting
Perhaps one of Leonardo da Vinci's greatest paintings has never been reprinted in books of his art. Known as the "Battle of Anghiari," it was abandoned and then lost -- until a determined Italian engineer gave the art world hope that it still existed, and a physicist from the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory developed a technique that may reveal it to the world once again.

15-Sep-2011
Simulating turbulent combustion speeds design of power and propulsion devices
A team led by mechanical engineers Joseph Oefelein and Jacqueline Chen of Sandia National Laboratories simulates turbulent combustion at different scales. Chen and Oefelein were allocated 113 million hours on Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Jaguar supercomputer in 2008, 2009 and 2010 to simulate autoignition and injection processes with alternative fuels. For 2011 they received 60 million processor hours for high-fidelity simulations of combustion in advanced engines.

25-Aug-2011
Microscopic imaging provides new insights
Being able to view nanoparticles and their spatial distribution in 3-D provides a greater depth of information for clearer scientific understanding than could be obtained from a 2-D image.

19-Aug-2011
Supercomputers and airplanes help model hurricane structure and intensity
Information from major hurricanes such as Katrina is being put to good use by scientists striving to understand how hurricanes intensify. A research team led by Jon Reisner of Los Alamos National Laboratory is employing the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Jaguar supercomputer to use data from lightning detectors and even wind instruments mounted on planes flown into the eye of a hurricane to improve atmospheric models. These simulations may lead to more accurate prediction of hurricane intensities.

12-Aug-2011
A catalyst for high-impact science
A multi-institutional team of scientists is using EMSL's new Recovery Act-funded capabilities to achieve new insights into catalytic reactions on the surfaces of advanced metal oxide-based materials. The work is part of an inaugural EMSL Research Campaign that brings together world-leading capabilities and expertise in support of more efficient, less costly catalysts -- a need with cross-cutting energy and industrial applications.

11-Aug-2011
Tribal schools create their own biodiesel to win energy challenge
Last year, American Indian tribal colleges and high schools competed to build the best wind turbine; this year, their challenge was different, but still related to renewable energy -- creating biodiesel fuel out of raw biomass.

8-Aug-2011
Breakthrough fusion simulations shed light on plasma confinement
A research team led by William Tang of the Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is developing a clearer picture of plasma confinement properties in an experimental device that will pave the way to future commercial fusion power plants. Over the past three years using resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Tang's team has made continual improvements to tools essential for computationally solving fusion problems.

5-Aug-2011
Special report highlights research at America's leadership computing facilities
A special report highlights the accomplishments of researchers running large, complex, and often unprecedented simulations on Department of Energy Office of Science supercomputers.

29-Jul-2011
Result tickler: Lead nucleus may bury positive side under neutral facade
Results from the Lead (Pb) Radius Experiment (PREx), performed last year at Jefferson Lab, suggest that the nucleus of a lead atom buries its positive "personality" beneath a neutral exterior. The preliminary result is consistent with the idea that neutrons form a kind of "neutron skin" around the protons in the nucleus in heavy nuclei. It is important for understanding heavy nuclei and for theoretical equations that describe the life cycles of neutron stars.

25-Jul-2011
Transparent batteries: Seeing straight through to the future?
SLAC and Stanford researchers have invented a transparent lithium-ion battery that is also highly flexible. It is comparable in cost to regular batteries on the market today, with great potential for applications in consumer electronics.

19-Jul-2011
Supercomputers aid in understanding the basic building blocks of nature
A team of scientists collaborating under the leadership of Paul Mackenzie of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has been awarded a total of 80 million processor hours at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility for quantum chromodynamics research to help develop a unified theory of how the four forces interact. Physicists believe that more fundamental interactions must unite the presently observed forces.

14-Jul-2011
Turning data into wild rides through dark domes
Thanks to scientists at SLAC and Stanford, planetarium audiences can fly through an increasingly realistic cosmos. A show now playing in San Francisco is a case in point. Unlike shows of a decade ago, all the animations are based on real scientific data � including visualizations made by researchers at KIPAC, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.

12-Jul-2011
It takes 3 to tango
Researchers who want to understand how and why a nucleus hangs together as it does must take into account the complex interactions known as the three-body force. This conclusion, drawn from simulations on America's most powerful supercomputer, is outlined in the May 20, 2011, edition of Physical Review Letters.

1-Jul-2011
Buried treasure
EMSL scientist Hongfei Wang and his team recently struck a vein that could lead to research gold for scientists interested in molecular interactions at interfaces. Their picosecond-femtosecond broadband sum frequency generation system is now ready to provide a new generation of surface vibrational spectroscopy and imaging.

29-Jun-2011
Odd particle left out in the cold
The old saying birds of a feather flock together may also be true for the smallest bits of matter. According to a study recently published in Physical Review Letters, like particles inside protons and neutrons band together, leaving the odd one out.

16-Jun-2011
Packing the ions
Drexel University's Yury Gogotsi and colleagues recently needed an atom's-eye view of a promising supercapacitor material to sort out experimental results that were exciting but appeared illogical. That view was provided by a research team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory computational chemists Bobby Sumpter and Jingsong Huang and computational physicist Vincent Meunier.