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...
In a breakthrough for neutron science, scientists used a 30 Tesla pulsed magnet and the powerful pulsed neutron beam at the Spallation Neutron Source to probe the magnetic behavior of the multiferroic material manganese tungstate. (A multiferroic material has both electrical and magnetic properties....
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
When converting corn into ethanol, a lot of lignin and cellulosic material is left over. We could get energy out of the remains and turn them into other useful chemicals—if only we had controllable, efficient processes. To improve those processes, computational chemist Ariana Beste and experimental ...