News By Location

The ePix series of detectors is designed to keep pace with ever more demanding experiments at SLAC and elsewhere.

This month marks the 30-year anniversary of the first website in North America, launched at SLAC. In this Q&A, one of the Wizards recalls the motivation that spawned the development and how it has changed the work of scientists.

A team at the Advanced Quantum Testbed at Berkeley Lab demonstrated that an experimental error mitigation method known as randomized compiling (RC) can dramatically reduce error rates in quantum algorithms and lead to more accurate and stable quantum computations.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated the first self-powered, aqueous robot that runs continuously without electricity. The technology has potential as an automated chemical synthesis or drug delivery system for pharmaceuticals.

Berkeley Lab scientists Maurice Garcia-Sciveres and Ramamoorthy Ramesh discuss how future microchips could perform better – and require less energy – than silicon. Over the next three years, they will lead two of the 10 projects recently awarded nearly $54 million by the Department of Energy to increase energy efficiency in microelectronics design and production.

One of the tools that researchers can apply to study the transcription factors that control how genes are turned on is known as DNA affinity purification sequencing or DAP-seq, developed by Ronan O’Malley. In Nature Methods, DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers led by co-first authors Leo Baumgart and Juna Lee developed two approaches that build upon the DAP-seq technology O’Malley developed.

For geothermal fields around the world, produced geothermal brine has been simply injected back underground, but now it’s become clear that the brines produced at the Salton Sea geothermal field contain an immense amount of lithium, a critical resource need for low-carbon transportation and energy storage. Demand for lithium is skyrocketing, as it is an essential ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have recently published a comprehensive review of past and current technologies for extracting minerals from geothermal brine.

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are making a concerted push to take thermal energy storage to the next level. To overcome some of the limitations of traditional water-based thermal energy storage, Berkeley Lab scientists are looking at developing next-generation materials and systems to be used as a heating or cooling medium. They are also creating a framework to analyze costs as well as a tool to compare cost savings. In a series of papers published this year, Berkeley Lab researchers have reported important advances in each of these areas.