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Quantum information scientists at ORNL hope to harness beams of light, or photons, as qubits for quantum networking. Credit: ORNL/Carlos Jones

ORNL’s next major computing achievement could open a new universe of scientific possibilities accelerated by the primal forces at the heart of matter and energy.

The micro-ring resonator, shown here as a closed loop, generated high-dimensional photon pairs. Researchers examined these photons by manipulating the phases of different frequencies, or colors, of light and mixing frequencies, as shown by the crisscrossed multicolor lines. Credit: Yun-Yi Pai/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Using existing experimental and computational resources, a multi-institutional team has developed an effective method for measuring high-dimensional qudits encoded in quantum frequency combs, which are a type of photon source, on a single optical chip.

ORNL’s Adam Guss and colleagues used synthetic biology to develop a custom microbe capable of converting deconstructed mixed plastic waste into valuable new materials. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists working on a solution for plastic waste have developed a two-step chemical and biological process to break down and upcycle mixed plastics into valuable bioproducts.

Yun-Yi Pai works with a closed-cycle dilution refrigerator designed for cryomagnetooptical microscopy at ORNL. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers are leveraging the behavior of nature at the smallest scales to develop technologies for science’s most complex problems.

Travis Humble. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Travis Humble has been named director of the Quantum Science Center headquartered at ORNL. The QSC is a multi-institutional partnership that spans industry, academia and government institutions and is tasked with uncovering the full potential of quantum materials, sensors and algorithms.

Physicist Charles Havener uses the NASA end station at ORNL’s Multicharged Ion Research Facility to simulate the origin of X-ray emissions from space. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists are using Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Multicharged Ion Research Facility to simulate the cosmic origin of X-ray emissions resulting when highly charged ions collide with neutral atoms and molecules, such as helium and gaseous hydrogen.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers built an Earth-to-space communications system to work with private and government partners with the goal of directly connecting data downlinks to high performance computing. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is debuting a small satellite ground station that uses high-performance computing to support automated detection of changes to Earth’s landscape.

Exploring the smallest distance scales with particle colliders often requires detailed calculations of the spectra of outgoing particles (smallest filled green circles). Image Credit: Benjamin Nachman, Berkeley Lab

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicists Christian Bauer, Marat Freytsis and Benjamin Nachman have leveraged an IBM Q quantum computer through the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Quantum Computing User Program to capture part of a

ORNL scientists created a new microbial trait mapping process that improves on classical protoplast fusion techniques to identify the genes that trigger desirable genetic traits like improved biomass processing. Credit: Nathan Armistead/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy. Reprinted with the permission of Oxford University Press, publisher of Nucleic Acids Research

ORNL scientists had a problem mapping the genomes of bacteria to better understand the origins of their physical traits and improve their function for bioenergy production.

ORNL’s Joseph Lukens runs experiments in an optics lab. Credit: Jason Richards/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists’ increasing mastery of quantum mechanics is heralding a new age of innovation. Technologies that harness the power of nature’s most minute scale show enormous potential across the scientific spectrum