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Catherine Schuman during Hour of Code

ORNL computer scientist Catherine Schuman returned to her alma mater, Harriman High School, to lead Hour of Code activities and talk to students about her job as a researcher.

The students analyzed diatom images like this one to compare wild and genetically modified strains of these organisms. Credit: Alison Pawlicki/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy.

Students often participate in internships and receive formal training in their chosen career fields during college, but some pursue professional development opportunities even earlier.

Tyler Gerczak, a materials scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is focused on post-irradiation examination and separate effects testing of current fuels for light water reactors and advanced fuel types that could be used in future nuclear systems. Credit: Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Ask Tyler Gerczak to find a negative in working at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and his only complaint is the summer weather. It is not as forgiving as the summers in Pulaski, Wisconsin, his hometown.

Symposium attendees represented ORNL, the University of Arizona, Georgia Tech, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and Brigham Young University.

Quantum experts from across government and academia descended on Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Wednesday, January 16 for the lab’s first-ever Quantum Networking Symposium. The symposium’s purpose, said organizer and ORNL senior scientist Nick Peters, was to gather quantum an...

Joseph Lukens, Raphael Pooser, and Nick Peters (from left) of ORNL’s Quantum Information Science Group developed and tested a new interferometer made from highly nonlinear fiber in pursuit of improved sensitivity at the quantum scale. Credit: Carlos Jones

By analyzing a pattern formed by the intersection of two beams of light, researchers can capture elusive details regarding the behavior of mysterious phenomena such as gravitational waves. Creating and precisely measuring these interference patterns would not be possible without instruments called interferometers.

Schematic drawing of the boron nitride cell. Credit: University of Illinois at Chicago.

A new microscopy technique developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago allows researchers to visualize liquids at the nanoscale level — about 10 times more resolution than with traditional transmission electron microscopy — for the first time. By trapping minute amounts of...

ORNL Image

For the past six years, some 140 scientists from five institutions have traveled to the Arctic Circle and beyond to gather field data as part of the Department of Energy-sponsored NGEE Arctic project. This article gives insight into how scientists gather the measurements that inform t...

A conceptual illustration of proton-proton fusion in which two protons fuse to form a deuteron. Image courtesy of William Detmold.

Nuclear physicists are using the nation’s most powerful supercomputer, Titan, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to study particle interactions important to energy production in the Sun and stars and to propel the search for new physics discoveries Direct calculatio...

The interior of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Alcator C-Mod tokamak. A team led by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s C.S. Chang recently used the Titan supercomputer

The same fusion reactions that power the sun also occur inside a tokamak, a device that uses magnetic fields to confine and control plasmas of 100-plus million degrees. Under extreme temperatures and pressure, hydrogen atoms can fuse together, creating new helium atoms and simulta...

Pellet selector

When it’s up and running, the ITER fusion reactor will be very big and very hot, with more than 800 cubic meters of hydrogen plasma reaching 170 million degrees centigrade. The systems that fuel and control it, on the other hand, will be small and very cold. Pellets of frozen gas will be shot int...