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New study finds the US wind power market riding a wave that is likely to crest in 2012

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Facing looming policy uncertainty beyond 2012, the US remained one of the fastest-growing wind power markets in the world in 2011 -- second only to China -- according to a new report released by Berkeley Lab. Driven by the threat of expiring federal incentives, new wind power installations are widely expected to be substantially higher in 2012 than in 2011, and perhaps even in excess of 2009's record build.

Funder: US Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

World's most powerful X-ray laser beam refined to scalpel precision

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

With a thin sliver of diamond, scientists at the DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford have transformed the Linac Coherent Light Source into an even more precise tool for exploring the nanoworld. The improvements yield laser pulses focused to higher intensity in a much narrower band of X-ray wavelengths, and may enable experiments that have never before been possible.

Journal: Nature Photonics
Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science

New phenomenon in nanodisk magnetic vortices

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

New findings from a team of Berkeley Lab and Japanese scientists suggest that the road to magnetic vortex RAM might be more difficult to navigate than previously supposed, but there might be unexpected rewards as well. A study at the Advanced Light Source revealed that contrary to suppositions, the formation of magnetic vortices in ferromagnetic nanodisks is an asymmetric phenomenon.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science

The first public data release from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Now available to the public: spectroscopic data from over 500,000 galaxies up to 7 billion light years away, over 100,000 quasars up to 11.5 billion light years away, and many thousands of other astronomical objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Data Release 9. This is the first data from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists, the largest spectroscopic survey ever for measuring evolution of large-scale galactic structure.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, SDSS-III Participating Institutions, National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Extreme plasma theories put to the test

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The first controlled studies of extremely hot, dense matter have overthrown the widely accepted 50-year-old model used to explain how ions influence each other's behavior in a dense plasma. The results should benefit a wide range of fields, from research aimed at tapping nuclear fusion as an energy source to understanding the inner workings of stars.

Journal: Physical Review Letters
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

A direct look at graphene

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Berkeley Lab researchers have recorded the first direct observations at microscopic lengths of how electrons and holes respond to a charged impurity in graphene. The results point to interactions between electrons as being critical to graphene's extraordinary properties.

Journal: Nature Physics
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research

Getting to the root -- unearthing the plant-microbe quid pro quo

DOE/Joint Genome Institute
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The microbial community or microbiome that inhabits the niches immediately surrounding and inside a plant's root facilitates the shuttling of nutrients and information into and out of the roots within the soil matrix. A report published Aug. 2, 2012, in Nature sheds light on the mechanisms driving the subterranean formation of this "plant microbiome" and how plants can influence the presence of the microbiota in the rhizosphere and vice versa.

Journal: Nature
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

BELLA laser achieves world record power at 1 pulse per second

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory the laser system for BELLA, the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator, has delivered a petawatt of power – a quadrillion watts – in a pulse just 40 femtoseconds long – a quadrillionth of a second – at one pulse per second. No other laser system has achieved this peak power at this pulse rate. BELLA's laser should soon be driving electron beams to 10-billion-electron-volt energies in an accelerator just one meter long.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Photovoltaics from any semiconductor

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a technology that enables low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material. This opens the door to the use of plentiful, relatively inexpensive semiconductors previously considered unsuitable for photovoltaics.

Journal: Nano Letters
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Science Foundation

Ferroelectricity on the nanoscale

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A research effort led by Berkeley Lab scientists has brought some clarity to the here-to-fore confusing physics of ferroelectric nanomaterials, pointing the way to multi-terabyte-per-square-inch of non-volatile computer memory chips.

Journal: Nature Materials
Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science