News Releases

(IDAHO FALLS, Idaho) – The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is seeking an industry sponsor to invest $5 million to $10 million in a privately funded innovation incubator. This program will combine the power of a national laboratory with private sector commercialization knowledge to unleash breakthrough innovations by finding and supporting promising startups in the areas of nuclear energy, integrated energy systems, cybersecurity and advanced materials.

Researchers have determined that six gas valves provide the best protection against plasma disruptions in SPARC, a next-generation, experimental fusion system. By refining the setup for the fusion vessel’s massive gas injection system, researchers are ensuring that disruptions — sudden jets of plasma that can damage the fusion vessel’s inner walls — are controlled efficiently, paving the way for safer, more robust fusion power plants.

Miaofang Chi and Rigoberto “Gobet” Advincula, both researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have been elected as Class of 2025 Fellows of the Materials Research Society, or MRS. Chi also holds a joint appointment at Duke University, and Advincula is jointly appointed at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Researchers have discovered that phasons, low-temperature quasiparticles found in crystal lattices, enable interlayer excitons to move at very low temperatures, when motion should stop. In addition to contributing to foundational materials science knowledge, this discovery could help improve the stability of quantum technologies, such as using excitons as qubits.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, entered its 25^th and final year of operations, smashing together the nuclei of gold atoms traveling close to the speed of light.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument used millions of galaxies and quasars to build the largest 3D map of our universe to date. Combining their data with other experiments shows signs that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time — and the standard model of how the universe works may need an update.

A new data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is now available for researchers to explore. The collection contains information on 18.7 million galaxies, quasars, and stars — the largest dataset of its kind ever shared.