Old thinking was that gold, while good for jewelry, was not of much use for chemists because it is relatively nonreactive. That changed a decade ago when scientists hit a rich vein of discoveries revealing that this noble metal, when structured into nanometer-sized particles, can speed up chemical reactions important in mitigating environmental pollutants and producing hard-to-make specialty chemicals.
The Spallation Neutron Source at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory broke records for sustained beam power level as well as for integrated energy and target lifetime in the month of June.
The American Conference on Neutron Scattering returned to Knoxville this week, 12 years after its inaugural meeting there in 2002.
Treating cadmium-telluride (CdTe) solar cell materials with cadmium-chloride improves their efficiency, but researchers have not fully understood why.
Photovoltaic spray paint could coat the windows and walls of the future if scientists are successful in developing low-cost, flexible solar cells based on organic polymers. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently discovered an unanticipated factor in the performance of polymer-based solar devices that gives new insight on how these materials form and function.
Using a new microscopy method, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory can image and measure electrochemical processes in batteries in real time and at nanoscale resolution.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville have pioneered a new technique for forming a two-dimensional, single-atom sheet of two different materials with a seamless boundary.