NEWS RELEASES

Kathleen Stebe, Richer & Elizabeth Goodwin Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), is tackling this challenge head-on with a collaborative group of researchers across five institutions under the support of a grant from the Department of Energy. Stebe is leading a groundbreaking research initiative that aims to create an eco-friendly, bioinspired process for separating REEs that would also avoid shipping semi-processed REEs to other countries for purification.

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

Plants and microbes are known to secrete enzymes to transform organic phosphorus into bioavailable inorganic phosphorus. Now, researchers report iron oxides can drive the same conversion at comparable rates as enzymes. The study adds yet another missing piece to nature’s mysterious phosphorus cycle that can be used to fuel plant growth.

Two experiment collaborations, the g2p and EG4 collaborations, combined their complementary data on the proton’s inner structure to improve calculations of a phenomenon in atomic physics known as the hyperfine splitting of hydrogen. An atom of hydrogen is made up of an electron orbiting a proton. The overall energy level of hydrogen depends on the spin orientation of the proton and electron. If one is up and one is down, the atom will be in its lowest energy state. But if the spins of these particles are the same, the energy level of the atom will increase by a small, or hyperfine, amount. These spin-born differences in the energy level of an atom are known as hyperfine splitting.

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.

In a series of papers, a Princeton research group has revealed fundamental insights into anode-free solid-state batteries, paving the way for efforts to improve their manufacturability.

Inside Dr. Todd Griffith’s laboratory stands a 6-foot-tall wind turbine that looks like an upside-down eggbeater; it’s actually a small-scale prototype for a radically different type of offshore wind turbine.

Griffith and his team of University of Texas at Dallas researchers recently demonstrated through extensive testing that the prototype works. The design shows promise for capturing untapped potential energy from wind blowing across deep ocean water.

A team of scientists from Princeton University has measured the energies of electrons in a new class of quantum materials and has found them to follow a fractal pattern. Fractals are self-repeating patterns that occur on different length scales and can be seen in nature in a variety of settings, including snowflakes, ferns, and coastlines. A quantum version of a fractal pattern, known as “Hofstadter’s butterfly,” has long been predicted, but the new study marks the first time it has been directly observed experimentally in a real material. This research paves the way toward understanding how interactions among electrons, which were left out of the theory originally proposed in 1976, give rise to new features in these quantum fractals. 

The study was made possible by a recent breakthrough in materials engineering, which involved stacking and twisting two sheets of carbon atoms to create a pattern of electrons that resembles a common French textile known as a moiré design.