The Department of Energy (DOE) has given the green light for construction to begin on a high-energy upgrade that will further boost the performance of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the world’s most powerful X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) at the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. When complete, the upgrade... Read more →

The Spallation Neutron Source (earlier post) at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory set a world record when its linear accelerator reached an operating power of 1.55 megawatts, which improves on the facility’s original design capability. The accelerator’s higher power provides more neutrons for researchers who use the... Read more →

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Florida International University have demonstrated the first real-time measurement—using lab-based methods—of free radical particles reacting under cosmic conditions, prompting elementary carbon and hydrogen atoms to coalesce into primal benzene rings. The researchers say that their... Read more →

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have used neutron diffraction to provide noninvasive measurement of lattice strains inside components of a firing engine, thereby enabling the operando study of complex load states and thermal gradients throughout the solid materials. Their results are published in an open-access paper in Proceedings... Read more →

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory have used the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at Argonne, to generate the first 3D images of the fluid flow inside a steel fuel injector nozzle. The high-speed 3D visualization will help engine manufacturers and suppliers improve the... Read more →

Particle accelerators generate high-energy beams of electrons, protons and ions for a wide range of applications, including particle colliders that shed light on nature’s subatomic components, X-ray lasers that film atoms and molecules during chemical reactions and medical devices for treating cancer. As a rule of thumb, the longer the... Read more →

Using X-rays from a synchrotron particle accelerator, scientists of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now been able to observe for the first time a catalyst during the Fischer-Tropsch reaction that facilitates the production of synthetic fuels under industrial conditions. The researchers intended to use the test results for... Read more →

Three scientists from the University of Chicago predict that there may be a way to make a material that could conduct both electricity and energy with 100% efficiency—never losing any to heat or friction. Their work, published in Physical Review B, suggests a framework for an entirely new type of... Read more →

The University of California San Siego (UCSD) has formed the San Diego Institute for Materials Discovery and Design, a joint initiative of the Jacobs School of Engineering and Division of Physical Sciences at UCSD. Shirley Meng, Zable Professor of NanoEngineering, will serve as director of the Institute; Michael Sailor, Distinguished... Read more →

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have invented a way to observe the movements of electrons with powerful X-ray laser bursts just 280 attoseconds, or billionths of a billionth of a second, long. The technology, called X-ray laser-enhanced attosecond pulse generation (XLEAP), is an advance that... Read more →

Nanalysis Scientific Corp. has entered into a collaboration agreement with Robert Bosch GmbH jointly to develop products for the growing industrial Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) market for applications such as on-board fuel analyzers for cargo ships, driven by new international environmental standards against dirty fuels. Bosch will distribute the products.... Read more →

Scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have taken the first images of carbon dioxide molecules within a molecular cage—part of a metal-organic framework (MOF), with great potential for separating and storing gases and liquids. Cryo-EM (cryogenic electron microscopy) images show a slice through... Read more →

The US Army Research Laboratory’s Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Propulsion has, for the first time, used X-rays with its experiment in a gas turbine combustor using X-rays. The data will help advance gas turbine engine designs for higher power density and efficiency, scientists said. Dr. Tonghun Lee, an associate... Read more →

A team of researchers from the Energy and Transportation Science Division at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is studying soot and ash collection and removal in particulate filters with neutron imaging, a technique sensitive enough to detect fine layers of material. Using the Neutron Imaging Facility instrument,... Read more →

A team from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has worked with industry partners to use neutrons to probe a running engine at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source (earlier post), giving them the opportunity to test an aluminum-cerium alloy under operating conditions. The feat was a first for the... Read more →

The correlation between spot welding and residual stress in boron steel was experimentally determined for the first time with neutron diffraction experiments conducted at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL). An open-access paper on the work is published in Metallurgical and Materials Transactions. A partnership led by WMG (Warwick Manufacturing Group) at... Read more →

Inspired by the Japanese concept of sato-umi—the convergence of land and sea where human and marine life can harmoniously coexist—Honda has established the Honda Marine Science Foundation, a new initiative to address marine ecosystem restoration and the impact of humans and climate change on oceans and intertidal areas. Committed to... Read more →

Scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a one-pot synthesis process using diamondoids—the smallest possible bits of diamond—to assemble atoms into hybrid metal–organic chalcogenide nanowires with solid inorganic cores having three-atom cross-sections, representing the smallest possible nanowires. By grabbing various types of... Read more →

One of its molecular mysteries of photosynthesis involves how the photosystem II protein complex harvests energy from sunlight and uses it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Now, an international team of researchers has used femtosecond pulses from an X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) at the Department of Energy’s... Read more →

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have directly probed the solid/liquid interface of the electrochemical double layer (EDL) using a novel X-ray toolkit. The X-ray tools and techniques could be extended, the researchers say, to provide new insight about battery performance and corrosion, a... Read more →

University of Pittsburgh engineers will utilize a unique transmission electron microscope developed and housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to better understand how microstructures form in metals and alloys as they solidify after laser beam melting. Under a three-year, $500,000-grant from the National Science Foundation, Jorg Wiezorek, a professor... Read more →

NASA has awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne a $67-million contract to design and develop an Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) for spaceflight. Work performed under the contract could potentially increase spaceflight transportation fuel efficiency by 10 times over current chemical propulsion technology and more than double thrust capability compared to current electric... Read more →

A team from the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and Forschungszentrum Jülich Institute of Energy and Climate Research has used neutron total scattering to gain new insights into atomic disordering of complex metal oxides. This provides a new basis for understanding order-to-disorder... Read more →

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Caterpillar, have used high-energy synchrotron X-ray tomography to perform quantitative 3D-characterization of the distribution of graphite particles in high-strength compacted graphite iron (CGI). The size and morphology of graphite particles play a crucial role in determining various mechanical and thermal properties of... Read more →

Researchers led by a team from the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are using neutron crystallography to understand the functioning of enzymes at the molecular level and to learn how to bioengineer those enzymes for large-scale improvements in the efficiency of biomass processing. Using the MaNDi... Read more →

New research led by scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University reveals how individual atoms move in trillionths of a second to form wrinkles on a three-atom-thick material. Visualized by a new “electron camera,” one of the world’s speediest, this unprecedented level of detail... Read more →

Scientists have used an X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to get the first glimpse of the transition state where two atoms begin to form a weak bond on the way to becoming a molecule. This fundamental advance, reported in Science and long thought impossible,... Read more →

Researchers from the Fuels, Engines and Emissions Research Center (FEERC) at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and collaborators from ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) (earlier post) are using neutron imaging to study the formation of damage-causing bubbles in fuel injectors. When gas bubbles form in injectors,... Read more →

Adding calcium atoms (orange spheres) between graphene planes (blue honeycomb) creates a superconducting material called CaC6. A study at SLAC has shown for the first time that graphene is a key player in this superconductivity: Electrons scatter back and forth between the graphene and calcium layers, interact with natural vibrations... Read more →

Images of Li-air cathode produced by neutron-computed tomography. Source: ORNL. Click to enlarge. This begins an occasional series on “big science” tools hosted at US national laboratories that are being applied to support the development of technology innovations for clean transportation. First up is a quick look at the two... Read more →