Thermal energy in ordinary crystal materials takes the form of tiny atomic vibrations that ripple through the material in waves. Instead of spreading evenly through the material, some of the energy will clump into little packets. Scientists had thought that these energy packets, which they call intr...
A special report highlights the accomplishments of researchers running large, complex and often unprecedented simulations on Department of Energy Office of Science supercomputers. The research community gains access to these powerful machines through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on ...
Polymer-based solar cells are attractive to solar energy developers because they are inexpensive and relatively easy to fabricate. But to be economically viable, they must be made more efficient. Neutron scattering measurements have shown that appropriately heat-treating (annealing) a thin film cont...
Nano-sized palladium particles elevate the performance of a new hydrogen microsensor to an unprecedented level, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Nickolay Lavrik. The key innovation is based on the fact nano-sized palladium particles react very quickly to hydrogen gas. "Our hydrogen senso...
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are making new functional nanocomposite materials by inserting nanoparticles into asymmetric block copolymer films, resulting in promising new matrices on which such materials can be constructed. The Magnetism Reflectometer at ORNL's Spallation Neutron So...
To study questions of why the universe has matter, physicists can try to create another ?Big Bang' somewhere and study how it evolves. If they only do it once, however, like flipping a coin, there is bias. So they must run a few thousand ?Big Bangs' and wait 14 billion years for each one and see how...
Nanoscale robots that can flow through blood or repair complex electronics may yet be a possibility with the help of a new strategy developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Although devices such as computer processors can effectively handle electrical signals at the length scale of 10 nanometers,...
Rare earth elements vital to electric and hybrid vehicles and numerous other energy technologies could one day be replaced at least in part by compounds of heavy transition elements, a team of researchers has discovered. This finding goes against conventional wisdom that high performance magnets req...
Enterprises from energy production to environmental cleanup depend on chemistry. A multi-institutional team has generated 70 publications in three years to demonstrate the prodigious scientific output of the world's fastest simulations exploring a continuum from chemistry to materials science. Many ...
Eliminating barriers to energy efficiency of U.S. industry is the focus of a new report commissioned by the Department of Energy and performed by Georgia Institute of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. As the consumer of about one-third of the nation's energy, the industrial sector presen...