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Tag: DOE Science News Source

  • New SLAC-Stanford Battery Center targets roadblocks to a sustainable energy transition

    New SLAC-Stanford Battery Center targets roadblocks to a sustainable energy transition

    Newswise — Menlo Park, Calif. – The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University today announced the launch of a new joint battery center at SLAC. It will bring together the resources and expertise of the national lab, the university and Silicon Valley to accelerate the deployment of batteries and other energy storage solutions as part of the energy transition that’s essential for addressing climate change.

    A key part of this transition will be to decarbonize the world’s transportation systems and electric grids ­– to power them without fossil fuels. To do so, society will need to develop the capacity to store several hundred terawatt-hours of sustainably generated energy. Only about 1% of that capacity is in place today.

    Filling the enormous gap between what we have and what we need is one of the biggest challenges in energy research and development. It will require that experts in chemistry, materials science, engineering and a host of other fields join forces to make batteries safer, more efficient and less costly and manufacture them more sustainably from earth-abundant materials, all on a global scale. 

    The SLAC-Stanford Battery Center will address that challenge. It will serve as the nexus for battery research at the lab and the university, bringing together large numbers of faculty, staff scientists, students and postdoctoral researchers from SLAC and Stanford for research, education and workforce training. 

     “We’re excited to launch this center and to work with our partners on tackling one of today’s most pressing global issues,” said interim SLAC Director Stephen Streiffer. “The center will leverage the combined strengths of Stanford and SLAC, including experts and industry partners from a wide variety of disciplines, and provide access to the lab’s world-class scientific facilities. All of these are important to move novel energy storage technologies out of the lab and into widespread use.”

    Expert research with unique tools

    Research and development at the center will span a vast range of systems – from understanding chemical reactions that store energy in electrodes to designing battery materials at the nanoscale, making and testing devices, improving manufacturing processes and finding ways to scale up those processes so they can become part of everyday life. 

    “It’s not enough to make a game-changing battery material in small amounts,” said Jagjit Nanda, a SLAC distinguished scientist, Stanford adjunct professor and executive director of the new center, whose background includes decades of battery research at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We have to understand the manufacturing science needed to make it in larger quantities on a massive scale without compromising on performance.”

    Longstanding collaborations between SLAC and Stanford researchers have already produced many important insights into how batteries work and how to make them smaller, lighter, safer and more powerful. These studies have used machine learning to quickly identify the most promising battery materials from hundreds made in the lab, and measured the properties of those materials and the nanoscale details of battery operation at the lab’s synchrotron X-ray facility. SLAC’s X-ray free-electron laser is available, as well, for fundamental studies of energy-related materials and processes. 

    SLAC and Stanford also pioneered the use of cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a technique developed to image biology in atomic detail, to get the first clear look at finger-like growths that can degrade lithium-ion batteries and set them on fire. This technique has also been used to probe squishy layers that build up on electrodes and must be carefully managed, in research performed at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES).

    Nanda said the center will also focus on making energy storage more sustainable, for instance by choosing materials that are abundant, easy to recycle and can be extracted in a way that’s less costly and produces fewer emissions.

    A unique collaboration in the heart of Silicon Valley 

    Battery Center Director Will Chueh, an associate professor at Stanford and faculty scientist at SLAC, emphasized that the center is located in the middle of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture, two miles from the Stanford campus and a short walk away from large, world-class scientific facilities that only a national lab can provide. This generates advantages that would be impossible for any single partner to achieve, including outstanding educational and training opportunities for Stanford students and postdocs that will play an outsized role in shaping the next generation of energy researchers. 

    “There’s no other place in the world,” Chueh said, “where all of this comes together.”

    A pilot project for the center began in 2020 with two battery laboratories in SLAC’s Arrillaga Science Center where Stanford students and postdoctoral researchers have been synthesizing battery materials and evaluating devices. 

    The center is operated by SLAC’s Applied Energy Division and Stanford’s Precourt Energy Institute. Major funding for battery research at SLAC comes from the DOE Office of Science and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser are DOE Office of Science user facilities.

    SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

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  • Andrew Ullman, Wigner Fellow, gets a charge out of batteries

    Andrew Ullman, Wigner Fellow, gets a charge out of batteries

    Newswise — Andrew Ullman had the pleasure of graduating high school not once, but twice.

    He had enough academic credits in Delaware, where he grew up, to graduate midway through senior year, and then he graduated, again, from a high school in Adelaide, Australia, where his father, a professor, was taking a year’s sabbatical.

    “School started in February; that’s their fall, so I just went straight from finishing my first semester (senior year) in Delaware to doing another full year of grade 12 in Australia,” said Ullman, a Eugene P. Wigner Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

    Two diplomas were plenty for Carleton College, where Ullman earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry, and for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he enrolled in the inorganic chemistry doctoral program. He ultimately earned his doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University, where he transferred when his mentor, professor Daniel G. Nocera, moved there midway through his program.

    Ullman’s dissertation focused on polynuclear cobalt complexes as models of a cobalt-based water oxidation catalyst. His research provided the understanding needed to further optimize the activity of metal-oxide-based water oxidation catalysts in neutral pHs.

    That interest brought him to DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories, where he worked on projects related to metal-organic frameworks for electronic devices and sensing applications after receiving his doctorate. He then went to work for Sepion Technologies, a battery company in San Francisco, before coming to ORNL in 2020.

    Ullman was always interested in math and science. “It just came naturally to me,” he said. “I found it interesting, and it challenged me intellectually. Writing a paper for English class was excruciating, but diving into a problem set for chemistry I really enjoyed.”

    As a Distinguished Staff Fellow in the Chemical Sciences Division focused on energy storage and conversion, Ullman is using chemistry to devise a better battery. He is broadly interested in electrochemical energy conversion — how electrons are transported and how chemical reactions are controlled by electrochemistry. That interest led him to batteries research within ORNL’s Energy Storage and Conversion group.

    Today’s batteries do not last as long as people need, particularly for their cellphones or electric vehicles. Ullman also is interested in replacing the materials currently used in batteries with ones that will be robust and allow for the efficient plating and stripping of lithium metal. That change would remove a significant amount of mass and volume from a battery’s anode. “In the end, you get a safer battery that stores more energy in a smaller volume,” Ullman said.

    A battery that has high energy density, inherent safety and a long life is the trifecta of energy storage. It could be used, Ullman said, for “anything that moves: cars, cellphones, flights, drones — you could reimagine a whole new industry.”

    Ullman himself appears to be full of energy. He is a big fan of ultimate frisbee — he’d play every weekend if he could. Ullman now spends a lot of his nonresearch time with his wife raising three girls, who demand a lot of time. He enjoys rock climbing, hiking and camping with the family. “Anything that makes me a better dad is important to me,” he said.

    Working at ORNL is a terrific fit for his career interests. “There is a huge amount of incredibly talented people around,” Ullman said. “As I meet more and more people, I realize there are more and more opportunities for building scientific collaborations. In my experience, that is the true superpower of working at a national lab; you can team up with experts in different subfields, come together and get really impactful things done quickly.”

    Although he studied at the University of Adelaide for six months and traveled much of the country, he would not mind returning to Australia’s west coast. “Maybe I could visit a mine where they produce lithium and nickel used in today’s batteries,” he said.

    ORNL’s Distinguished Staff Fellowship program aims to cultivate future scientific leaders by providing dedicated mentors, world-leading scientific resources and enriching research opportunities. Fellowships are awarded to outstanding early-career scientists and engineers who demonstrate success within their academic, professional and technical areas. Fellowships are awarded for fundamental, experimental and computational sciences in a wide range of science areas.

    UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Lawrence Bernard

    Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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  • JoAnne Hewett Named Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory

    JoAnne Hewett Named Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory

    Newswise — UPTON, NY—The Board of Directors of Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA) has named theoretical physicist JoAnne Hewett as the next director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and BSA president. BSA, a partnership between Stony Brook University (SBU) and Battelle, manages and operates Brookhaven Lab for DOE’s Office of Science. Hewett will also hold the title of professor in SBU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and professor at SBU’s C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.

    “JoAnne has a strong research background and extensive experience as a scientist and leader,” said DOE Office of Science Director Asmeret Asefaw Berhe. “She is a great choice to advance the Department of Energy’s priorities at Brookhaven—from fundamental breakthroughs to applications that improve people’s lives each and every day.”

    Hewett’s appointment comes after an international search that began in summer 2022. Current Brookhaven Lab Director Doon Gibbs announced in March 2022 his plans to step down after leading the Laboratory for nearly a decade.

    Hewett comes to Brookhaven from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, CA, where she most recently served as associate lab director (ALD) for fundamental physics and chief research officer. She also is a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at SLAC/Stanford University.

    “JoAnne brings vital experience and proven leadership skills to further Brookhaven Lab’s game-changing discoveries and innovative breakthroughs that benefit science and society,” said Maurie McInnis, president, Stony Brook University, and co-chair, BSA Board of Directors. “As Brookhaven advances major projects, expands its mission, and further modernizes its campus where scientists are solving the most urgent challenges of our time, we are pleased to welcome her as the Lab’s next director.”

    “We are so excited to welcome JoAnne Hewett as the next director of Brookhaven National Laboratory,” said BSA Board co-chair Mark Peters, executive vice president for national laboratory management and operations at Battelle. “Her outstanding scientific credentials and management and leadership skills will lead the Lab to new heights of scientific discovery and impactful science and technology in service of our nation.”

    Brookhaven Lab celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2022 and is home to seven Nobel Prize-winning discoveries and countless advances. Its 5,322-acre site on eastern Long Island attracts scientists from across the country and around the world, offering them expertise and access to large user facilities with unique capabilities. As DOE’s only multi-program lab in the northeastern U.S., Brookhaven hosts thousands of guest researchers and facility users each year—in-person and virtually—from universities, private industry, and government agencies. The Lab’s annual budget is approximately $700 million, much of which is funded by the DOE and its Office of Science.

    As Lab director, Hewett will oversee a team of more than 2,800 scientists, engineers, technicians, and professionals working to address challenges in nuclear and high energy physics, clean energy and climate science, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, photon sciences, isotope production, accelerator science and technology, and national security.

    “I am honored to take on the role of laboratory director at Brookhaven, a truly exceptional national laboratory with a rich history and a talented and dedicated staff,” said Hewett. “The Lab has an extremely bright future, one that will help solve some of the greatest scientific challenges facing the world today.” 

    Hewett is expected to join Brookhaven Lab this summer. Gibbs will retire on April 17, and Brookhaven’s long-time Deputy Director for Operations Jack Anderson will serve as interim laboratory director until Hewett is on board. The Lab’s current ALD for Facilities and Operations Tom Daniels will serve as interim deputy director for operations while Anderson is in the interim director role.

    “I am grateful to Doon for his outstanding leadership of Brookhaven and his long legacy of building and strengthening the Lab for advancing scientific discovery,” said Hewett. “I am excited to realize the truly ambitious array of projects here, launch innovative, world-leading science programs, expand the diversity of the Brookhaven community, and continue to strengthen our ties to New York State and our partner universities.”

    Governor Kathy Hochul added, “Brookhaven National Laboratory plays an important role for advancing science and engineering both nationally and here in New York, and I’m confident that JoAnne Hewett will be a great addition as the newest director. JoAnne is not only incredibly qualified and talented, but will also make history as the first woman to serve in this critical role. The Lab has developed innovative ways to deliver on New York’s top priorities, from battling disease to acting on climate, that are making a difference today and for the future of New York. I look forward to working with JoAnne Hewett in her new role as Brookhaven continues to advance cutting-edge technologies to improve the lives of New Yorkers.”

    Hewett will also participate in the final hiring decision for the deputy director for science and technology position currently held by Robert Tribble. The search for Tribble’s replacement is nearing completion following his announcement last year that he would also step down after eight years in his current role.

    Longtime Scientist, Leader

    Hewett is a theoretical physicist. Her research probes the fundamental nature of space, matter, and energy. She is best known for her work on physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics and how that might relate to experiments.

    Since joining SLAC faculty in 1994 as its first woman member, Hewett has served in key leadership roles, including head of the Theoretical Physics Group, deputy director of the Science Directorate and director of SLAC’s Elementary Particle Physics (EPP) Division, as well as her current roles as ALD and CRO.

    During her tenure as ALD, Hewett aligned the program with the particle physics community’s highest priorities by establishing a neutrino theory and experimental program, initiated the Dark Matter New Initiatives program for small experiments, launched the Detector Microfabrication Facility, and oversaw the transition of Rubin Observatory and Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search to commissioning and operations. As deputy director of the Q-NEXT national quantum center, she helped shepherd a key partnership between SLAC and other institutions to further the field of quantum science.

    Hewett has twice been a member of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel—which advises the federal government on the national program in experimental and theoretical high energy physics (HEP) research—and is the panel’s current chair. She made major contribution to the recent Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (“P5”) plan that defines priorities for U.S. high-energy physics research over the next 10 years. She also has served on the program advisory committees for SLAC, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the Cornell Electron Storage Ring.

    Hewett is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. She also served as chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles & Fields in 2016.

    Hewett earned her bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics and Ph.D. in physics from Iowa State University.

    Looking to the Future

    Hewett is taking on this role at an exciting time, as Brookhaven prepares to begin construction of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). This one-of-a-kind nuclear physics research facility will be built at Brookhaven through a partnership among DOE, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and Brookhaven. The EIC is being funded by the federal government, primarily through the DOE Office of Science. It will draw on expertise throughout the DOE national laboratory complex and from universities and research institutions worldwide. The total project cost is expected to range from $1.7-2.8 billion. About $100 million in New York State funding will support EIC construction of new infrastructure at Brookhaven Lab that is essential for the EIC project.

    The Laboratory is also building a new welcome center, the Science and User Support Center. This is the first building planned for Discovery Park, a new vision for Brookhaven Lab’s gateway to increase opportunities for the community to engage with the Laboratory and the DOE.

    “I can’t think of a better time to join such a vibrant Laboratory, given all of the exciting projects ahead—including the EIC, Discovery Park, and an expanded medical isotopes program—that will help define the Lab’s future,” said DOE Brookhaven Site Office Manager Robert Gordon.

    “I am head-over-heels excited to build the EIC in partnership with Jefferson Lab to unlock the mysteries of the force that binds Nature’s building blocks, to strengthen connections to industry and the community with Discovery Park, and to advance the multi-program missions of the Lab,” said Hewett. “And I’m very much looking forward to working with everyone at Brookhaven, Stony Brook, and the DOE to usher the Lab into its next successful chapter.”

    Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

    Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

    Brookhaven National Laboratory

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  • Story tip: A wise tool for modifying microbes

    Story tip: A wise tool for modifying microbes

    Newswise — A DNA editing tool adapted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists makes engineering microbes for everything from bioenergy production to plastics recycling easier and faster.

    The Serine recombinase-Assisted Genome Engineering, or SAGE system, lets scientists quickly insert and test new DNA designs in a variety of microorganisms. Engineered microbes hold promise for making biofuels, recycling mixed plastics, aiding soil carbon storage and treating health disorders.

    “SAGE works in virtually all microorganisms, revolutionizing what we’re able to do with microbes,” said ORNL’s Adam Guss. Microbes were modified in a few days with SAGE, compared with a tailoring process that can take weeks using existing methods.

    SAGE can advance fundamental biology as well as bioengineering, Guss said. “As a national lab, enabling science everywhere is part of our mission. SAGE is a tool that can speed the work of industry and academic researchers in their own organisms of interest.”

    UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov.


    Journal Link: Science Advances

    Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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  • Signs of Gluon Saturation Emerge from Particle Collisions

    Signs of Gluon Saturation Emerge from Particle Collisions

    The Science

    Nuclear physicists collide protons with heavier ions (atomic nuclei) to explore the fundamental constituents that make up those ions. By tracking particles that stream out of the collisions, they can zoom in beyond the ions’ protons and neutrons to study those particles’ innermost building blocks—quarks and gluons. Recent results revealed a suppression of certain back-to-back pairs of particles that emerge from interactions of single quarks from the proton with single gluons in the heavier ion. The suppression was greatest in collisions with the heaviest nuclei. The results suggest that gluons in heavy nuclei recombine, as predicted by the theory of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics.

    The Impact

    Previous experiments have shown that when ions are accelerated to high energies, gluons split to multiply to very high numbers. But scientists suspect that gluon multiplication can’t go on forever. Instead, in nuclei moving close to the speed of light, where relativistic motion flattens the nuclei into speeding gluon “pancakes,” overlapping gluons should start to recombine. Seeing evidence of recombination would be a step toward proving that gluons reach a postulated steady state called saturation, where gluon splitting and recombination balance out. The new results match with theoretical models postulating this saturated state.

    Summary

    To search for signs of gluon recombination, scientists with the STAR Collaboration used the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility. They were looking for a telltale signal produced in collisions of protons with a range of ions when a single quark from the proton interacts with an individual gluon in the ion. That signal is a pair of neutral pions striking a forward detector at back-to-back angles. If gluons in the nuclei recombine, scientists would expect to see a suppression in this back-to-back signal because fewer gluons would be available for the quark-gluon interactions. They looked for the signal in collisions of protons with different sized ions.

    Theorists had predicted that gluon recombination would be more prominent the larger the ion. That’s because heavy ions (nuclei) have more quark-and-gluon-containing protons and neutrons. When accelerated to near the speed of light, these ions flatten out, making the abundant gluons overlap and more likely to merge. Bigger nuclei with more gluons, should mean more merging and more suppression in the signal. That’s exactly what the scientists found. The results provide evidence that gluons recombine—and a strong suggestion that gluon splitting and recombination could produce the predicted saturated state.

     

    Funding

    This research was funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science, Nuclear Physics program, the National Science Foundation, and a range of international agencies listed in the published paper.

    Department of Energy, Office of Science

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  • ORNL malware ‘vaccine’ generator licensed for Evasive.ai platform

    ORNL malware ‘vaccine’ generator licensed for Evasive.ai platform

    Newswise — Access to artificial intelligence and machine learning is rapidly changing technology and product development, leading to more advanced, efficient and personalized applications by leveraging a massive amount of data.

    However, the same abilities also are in the hands of bad actors, who use AI to create malware that evades detection by the algorithms widely employed by network security tools. Government agencies, banking institutions, critical infrastructure, and the world’s largest companies and their most used products are increasingly under threat from malware that can evade anti-virus systems, hijack networks, halt operations and expose sensitive and personal information.

    A technology developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and used by the U.S. Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, or NAVWAR, to test the capabilities of commercial security tools has been licensed to cybersecurity firm Penguin Mustache to create its Evasive.ai platform. The company was founded by the technology’s creator, former ORNL scientist Jared M. Smith, and his business partner, entrepreneur Brandon Bruce.

    “One of ORNL’s core missions is to advance the science behind national security,” said Susan Hubbard, ORNL’s deputy for science and technology. “This technology is the result of our deep AI expertise applied to a big challenge — protecting the nation’s cyber- and economic security.”

    Smith, who worked in ORNL’s Cyber Resilience and Intelligence Division for six years, created the technology — the adversarial malware input generator, or AMIGO — at the request of the Department of Defense. AMIGO was created as the evaluation tool for a challenge issued by NAVWAR for AI applications that autonomously detect and quarantine cybersecurity threats. NAVWAR is an operations unit within the Navy that focuses on secure communications and networks.

    “ORNL’s Cyber Resilience and Intelligence Division is a world leader in cybersecurity technology,” said Moe Khaleel, associate laboratory director for the lab’s National Security Sciences Directorate. “Moving AMIGO into the marketplace will help protect our nation’s critical infrastructure from attack.”

    “We put AMIGO to the test in a realistic environment. It’s been through the wringer and has been validated at a high technical readiness level,” Smith said. “The core technology is designed to build evasive malware, like a virus, that can bypass an existing detection technology.”

    Drawing on more than 35 million malware samples — some publicly available and others never before seen — AMIGO generates optimally evasive malware in tandem with the training information needed for a security system to detect it in the future.

    Smith likens the process to vaccine development. “It’s as if we generated a million virus variants and a million vaccines to protect against them — we can collapse that into one vaccine and inoculate everyone. They’re protected against the threat, but also all the natural evolutions of the threat going forward.”

    Luke Koch, who in 2019 worked on the AMIGO development team through the DOE Office of Science’s SULI, or Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program, is now a doctoral student at the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, a collaboration between ORNL and the University of Tennessee, as well as a graduate research assistant in ORNL’s Cybersecurity Research Group. With Smith’s direction, Koch wrote the binary instrumentation code used in AMIGO.

    “Cybersecurity commercialization is important because our adversaries are always probing for weaknesses throughout the supply chain,” Koch said. “One single flaw is all it takes to invalidate a clever and expensive defense.”

    Amid a growing public understanding of the power of AI, the team is eager to see AMIGO integrated into Evasive.ai and implemented by national security agencies to protect government assets and infrastructure.

    “Bad actors are already using artificial intelligence to advance their attacks,” Bruce said. “As open AI tools improve, attempts to penetrate security systems will increase in volume and sophistication.”

    Additionally, long-term use of the Evasive.ai platform could inform a more complete understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to adversarial samples. This insight will make the next generation of machine learning defenses more robust.

    And what does any of this have to do with penguins? The company’s playful name is a riff on the problem of a small mutation enabling a virus to evade existing defenses — a penguin disguised with a mustache.

    ORNL commercialization manager Andreana Leskovjan negotiated the terms of the license. For more information about ORNL’s intellectual property in information technology and communications, email ORNL Partnerships or call 865-574-1051. To connect with the Evasive.ai team, complete the online form on the Evasive.ai website.

    The Bredesen Center program is part of the University of Tennessee Oak Ridge Innovation Institute.

    UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

    Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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  • DOE funds next-generation Center for Bioenergy Innovation at ORNL to advance renewable jet fuel

    DOE funds next-generation Center for Bioenergy Innovation at ORNL to advance renewable jet fuel

    Newswise — The Center for Bioenergy Innovation has been renewed by the Department of Energy as one of four bioenergy research centers across the nation to advance robust, economical production of plant-based fuels and chemicals. CBI, led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is focused on the development of nonfood biomass crops and specialty processes for the production of sustainable jet fuel to help decarbonize the aviation sector.

    The DOE announcement provides $590 million to the centers over the next five years. Initial funding for the four centers will total $110 million for Fiscal Year 2023. Outyear funding will total up to $120 million per year over the following four years, contingent on availability of funds.

    “To meet our future energy needs, we will need versatile renewables like bioenergy as a low-carbon fuel for some parts of our transportation sector,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Continuing to fund the important scientific work conducted at our Bioenergy Research Centers is critical to ensuring these sustainable resources can be an efficient and affordable part of our clean energy future.” 

    CBI’s national laboratory, university and industry partners will take a multipronged, accelerated approach over the next five years to producing sustainable jet fuel. Focus areas include:

    • Developing perennial crops that require less water and fertilizer and yield high amounts of biomass with the desired qualities for conversion to bioproducts.
    • Refining an efficient, cost-effective consolidated bioprocessing and co-treatment process using custom microbes to break down plants and ferment intermediate chemicals.
    • Advancing the extraction of lignin from plants and chemically converting it into aviation fuel.
    • Improving the chemical catalyst-based upgrading of intermediate bioproducts into jet fuel that can be blended with conventional fuel to significantly reduce aircraft carbon emissions.

    CBI intends to reach Tier 1 validation of its jet biofuel, an aviation industry standard that determines the fuel’s properties are fit-for-purpose in existing and future airplane fleets. The development of renewable fuels is a key strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from commercial aircraft.

    “Our researchers are excited to apply the best of biology and chemistry and create sustainable jet fuel to help clean up our skies and stimulate a thriving bioeconomy,” said ORNL’s Jerry Tuskan, CBI chief executive officer. “CBI’s feedstocks-to-fuels process will support upgrading carbohydrates and lignin from corn stover, process-advantaged switchgrass and poplar biomass into a tunable portfolio of chemicals for jet biofuel.”

    The new centers follow the success of pioneering bioenergy research centers established by DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research within DOE’s Office of Science in 2007.

    The ORNL-led CBI and its predecessor, the BioEnergy Science Center, demonstrated significant scientific breakthroughs in their mission to design ideal biomass feedstock crops and microbes to overcome the natural resistance of plants to being broken down and converted into fuels and products. In the last five years, CBI authored or co-authored 449 peer-reviewed journal articles that were cited 12,295 times by the scientific community In the same period CBI generated 57 invention disclosures, 32 patent applications, four license/option agreements and one start-up. The center has also reached more than 310,000 students, parents and teachers as a result of its educational outreach programs.

    “CBI’s collaborative science model and foundational success are key to accelerating the innovation needed for widespread, sustainable and profitable production of jet fuel from lignocellulosic feedstocks,” said Stan Wullschleger, ORNL associate laboratory director for Biological and Environmental Systems Science.

    “CBI builds on 15 years of success in applying scientific breakthroughs to meet the nation’s energy and decarbonization challenge,” said interim ORNL Director Jeff Smith. “CBI represents the national laboratory system at its best—developing scientific solutions to benefit the nation and inspiring the next generation of scientists through unique educational outreach.”

    Current partners in the next generation of CBI with ORNL include the University of Georgia; National Renewable Energy Laboratory; Dartmouth College; University of Maryland Eastern Shore; Brookhaven National Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Poplar Innovations Inc.; Pennsylvania State University; University of California, Davis; University of California San Diego; University of Tennessee; University of Wisconsin–Madison; University of Virginia; Washington State University; and France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment.

    UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov/.

    Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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  • Sutharshan named ORNL deputy for operations

    Sutharshan named ORNL deputy for operations

    Newswise — Balendra Sutharshan has been named chief operating officer for Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He will begin serving as ORNL’s deputy for operations and as executive vice president, operations, for UT-Battelle effective April 1. He will succeed Alan Icenhour, who is retiring this spring after serving in the role since 2021. UT-Battelle operates ORNL for the Department of Energy.

    Sutharshan joined ORNL in February 2021 as the associate laboratory director for the Isotope Science and Engineering Directorate. Under his leadership, ISED has achieved remarkable growth in isotope research and development, as well as production to meet the increased demand for isotopes used in medicine, research and security.

    “Balendra brings comprehensive experience to the position, including an extensive knowledge of ORNL’s nuclear capabilities, strong relationships across the national lab and Battelle systems, and a history of driving operational performance improvements and organizational strategy,” interim ORNL Director Jeff Smith said. “I am excited for Balendra to serve in this important role for ORNL.”

    During Sutharshan’s tenure as ALD, ISED has deployed new enrichment technology capabilities and stewarded new projects that will help to secure the domestic isotope supply chain, including the Stable Isotope and Production Research Center, the Stable Isotope Production Facility and the Radioisotope Processing Facility. He established the Isotope Processing and Manufacturing Division in 2022 to further improve production performance and introduced predictive maintenance into the lab’s hot cell facilities to reduce downtime.

    He has also been active in developing new partnerships to grow and train the pipeline of future talent needed to conduct isotope science and production, and he has placed a significant emphasis on improving ISED’s culture.

    As the chief operating officer of UT-Battelle, Sutharshan will lead the formulation and implementation of cross-cutting operation plans and integrated facility strategies to enable ORNL’s missions. He also will play a lead role in the lab’s commitment to community engagement.

    “It’s an honor to be part of an organization that empowers leaders and teams to pursue breakthrough science and technology and has roots back to the Manhattan Project,” Sutharshan said. “I look forward to strengthening ORNL’s operations and facilities strategies and continuing to support the lab’s engagement with communities where we work and live.”

    Prior to joining ORNL, Sutharshan served as COO for the Operational Systems Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In this position, he provided leadership of the directorate responsible for all of PNNL’s infrastructure and facilities as well as its environmental, health, safety, security, project management and nuclear operations programs. Before joining PNNL, Sutharshan served as COO for the Energy and Global Security Directorate at Argonne National Laboratory and served on the DOE review team that analyzed the 2018 High Flux Isotope Reactor fuel event. In addition, he spent nearly 20 years in a series of leadership roles with Westinghouse Electric Company.

    Sutharshan holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a master’s in chemical and nuclear engineering and a bachelor’s in chemical engineering from the University of Toronto; and an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

    UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

    Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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  • DOE renews bioenergy center at Illinois

    DOE renews bioenergy center at Illinois

    Newswise — URBANA, Ill. — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has committed another round of funding to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to lead the second phase of its Bioenergy Research Center — one of four large-scale DOE-funded research centers focused on innovation in biofuels, bioproducts, and a clean energy future for the country.

    Earlier today the DOE announced a five-year extension of funding for the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), to a total of $237.9 million for the period from 2017 to 2027. CABBI is a collaboration between the university’s Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE); the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB); 11 academic departments across the Illinois campus, including five in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES); and 20 partner institutions across the nation.

    “To meet our future energy needs, we will need versatile renewables like bioenergy as a low-carbon fuel for some parts of our transportation sector,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said in the DOE news release. “Continuing to fund the important scientific work conducted at our Bioenergy Research Centers is critical to ensuring these sustainable resources can be an efficient and affordable part of our clean energy future.”

    Andrew Leakey, Professor and Head of the Department of Plant Biology at Illinois, will continue as Director of CABBI, a position he has held since 2020.

    “Energy independence has become an increasingly important security issue for the United States, and CABBI will continue to provide breakthroughs toward a new generation of sustainable, cost-effective biofuels and bioproducts that will replace fossil fuel-based products,” Leakey said. “This grant represents a massive investment in CABBI and its diverse team of scientists. We are committed to help push the U.S. toward a new bio-based economy.”

    Under the funding extension, Emily Heaton, a Professor of Regenerative Agriculture in the Department of Crop Sciences at ACES, will continue to lead the Feedstock Production theme at CABBI. Her team, which includes seven other ACES faculty from Crop Sciences, uses the “plants as factories” paradigm, in which biofuels, bioproducts, and foundation molecules for conversion are grown directly in crops that are resilient and productive.

    “This award advances our capacity to protect and enhance the natural resource base on which all life depends by using resilient plants for power, fuel, and products,” Heaton said. “The science and practices being developed by CABBI and our collaborators will translate into secure domestic energy with climate benefits. I am excited we can also use this funding to complement our corn/soy agriculture with strategically placed perennial bioenergy crops, bringing cleaner air and water, healthier soil, and good new jobs for our rural communities.”

    The two other CABBI themes, Conversion and Sustainability, are also stacked with lead scientists from ACES departments. Those teams focus on turning plants into high-value chemicals and ensuring a sustainable environmental and economic bottom line, respectively.

    Madhu Khanna, Alvin H. Baum Family Fund Chair, Director of iSEE, a CABBI Sustainability Theme researcher, and Professor in the ACES Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, said iSEE is excited to support CABBI research in partnership with IGB and with the College ACES to enable cutting-edge research at the 320-acre Illinois Energy Farm — “a unique living laboratory that enables researchers to grow trials of promising biofuel feedstocks at the field scale” — and other partner sites.

    “One of the world’s major challenges is to provide sustainable sources of energy that meet societal needs as the population continues to grow,” Khanna said, “and Illinois is uniquely qualified to help lead that challenge” with the world-class facilities at IBRL and at IGB — the latter of which oversees and integrates CABBI’s core science team under one roof.

    Said IGB Director Gene E. Robinson: “The IGB has over 15 years of experience in successfully addressing grand challenges by transdisciplinary integration of the life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, and engineering, and we are proud to host the CABBI team. Our partnership with iSEE has been a successful one for five years, and we look forward to five more years of breakthrough discoveries.”

    Susan Martinis, the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Illinois and Chair of CABBI’s Governance Board, noted the university’s strong DOE research portfolio, which is regularly among the top five in the nation. The Center is one of four DOE Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs), joining the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) led by the University of Wisconsin and Michigan State University, the Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI) led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

    “The unique partnership between our research institutes and interdisciplinary collaboration across academic disciplines are hallmarks of research at Illinois,” Martinis said. “IGB and iSEE have built an infrastructure in fields, labs, and virtual environments to allow researchers to do what they do best: solve the world’s most pressing problems. For the CABBI team, that means uniting experts nationwide in agriculture, engineering, genomics, biology, chemistry, economics, and more to deliver on the promise of bioenergy and bioproducts innovation.”

    Phase II partner institutions include Brookhaven (N.Y.) National Laboratory; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.; HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Ala.; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Houma, La., Peoria, Ill., and Urbana, Ill.; Alabama A&M University (new addition for Phase II); Colorado State University; Iowa State University; Mississippi State University; Penn State University; Princeton (N.J.) University; Texas A&M University; University of California-Berkeley; University of Florida; University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and West Virginia University.

    The Center employs nearly 60 faculty-level researchers — including seven from underrepresented groups who were added since the founding in 2017 — more than 160 postdoctoral researchers and technicians, 90 graduate students, and 50 undergraduates, and 15 support staff. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts include a paid summer research internship for undergraduates from underrepresented groups in STEM, and efforts are underway to find corporate and philanthropic funding to expand that program during Phase II.

    “One of the best ways for our nation to strengthen our competitiveness with the rest of the world is to enhance the brilliance that already exists right here in Illinois,” U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said in the DOE news release. “I’m pleased that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation will receive this federal funding to help support groundbreaking research on clean energy, create jobs, address climate change and further secure Illinois’s place as a global leader.”

    Added U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski, D-Ill.: “As a graduate of the University of Illinois and its proud representative in Congress, I’m honored to join Secretary Granholm in announcing $590 million that will benefit bioenergy research at my alma mater. For the last five years, the University of Illinois has done groundbreaking research at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation to revolutionize the role of biofuels and agriculture in our 21st century energy economy. I’m so glad to see funding for this project renewed for the next five years, and I look forward to seeing how these resources will benefit family farmers, our environment, and rural communities across central and southern Illinois.”

    The BRC Program was established in 2007 and, in total, led to 4,452 peer-reviewed publications, 845 invention disclosures, 715 patent applications, 298 licenses or options, 261 patents, and 22 start-up companies as of August 2022. Learn more at science.energy.gov.

    Read the DOE’s news release on its website >>>

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Science (ACES)

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  • Hitting Nuclei with Light May Create Fluid Primordial Matter

    Hitting Nuclei with Light May Create Fluid Primordial Matter

    The Science

    A new analysis supports the idea that particles of light (photons) colliding with heavy ions create a fluid of “strongly interacting” particles. The calculations are based on the hydrodynamic particle flow seen in collisions of various types of ions at both the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). With only modest changes, these calculations also describe flow patterns seen in near-miss collisions at the LHC. In these collisions, photons that form a cloud around the speeding ions collide with the ions in the opposite beam.

    The Impact

    The results indicate that photon-heavy ion collisions can create a strongly interacting fluid that responds to the initial collision geometry, exhibiting hydrodynamic behavior. This further means that these collisions can form a quark-gluon plasma, a system of quarks and gluons liberated from the protons and neutrons that make up the ions. These findings will help guide future experiments at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a facility planned to be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory over the next decade.

    Summary

    It may seem surprising that photon-heavy ion collisions can produce a hot and dense fluid. But it’s possible because a photon can undergo quantum fluctuations to become another particle with the same quantum numbers. A likely example is a rho meson, made of a quark and antiquark held together by gluons. When a rho meson collides with a nucleus, it forms a collision system very similar to a proton-nucleus collision, which also exhibits flow-like signals.

    The current analysis by theorists at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Wayne State University sought to explain data from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The theorists found that accounting for the energy difference between the rho meson and the much higher energy of the incoming nucleus was the most important ingredient for their calculations’ ability to reproduce the experimental results. In the most energetic heavy ion collisions, the pattern of particles emerging transverse to the colliding beams generally persists no matter how far you look from the collision point along the beamline. But in lower-energy photon-lead collisions, the model showed that the geometry of the particle distributions changes rapidly with increasing longitudinal distance. This decorrelation had a large effect on the observed flow pattern, showing that 3D hydrodynamic modeling is essential for simulating these low energy photon-lead collisions.

     

    Funding

    This research was funded by Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics and the National Science Foundation. The research used computational resources of the Open Science Grid, supported by the National Science Foundation.


    Journal Link: Physical Review Letters

    Department of Energy, Office of Science

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  • Shape-Shifting Experiment Challenges Interpretation of How Cadmium Nuclei Move

    Shape-Shifting Experiment Challenges Interpretation of How Cadmium Nuclei Move

    The Science

    Atomic nuclei take a range of shapes, from spherical (like a basketball) to deformed (like an American football). Spherical nuclei are often described by the motion of a small fraction of the protons and neutrons, while deformed nuclei tend to rotate as a collective whole. A third kind of motion has been proposed since the 1950s. In this motion, known as nuclear vibration, atomic nuclei fluctuate about an average shape. Scientists recently investigated cadmium-106 using a technique called Coulomb excitation to probe its nuclear shape. They found clear experimental evidence that the vibrational description fails for this isotope’s nucleus. This finding is counter to the expected results.

    The Impact

    This research builds on a long quest to understand the transition between spherical and deformed nuclei. This transition often includes vibrational motion as an intermediate step. The new result suggests that nuclear physicists may need to revise the long-standing paradigm describing how this transition occurs. Scientists have not yet answered the question of what behavior takes place during this transition, but new evidence points to a description based on rotational motion of a nucleus together with a reorganization of its outermost protons and neutrons. The results make clear that scientists need more data to shed light on nuclei they have traditionally thought to be vibrational.

    Summary

    A multinational team of nuclear physicists used the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne National Laboratory, to accelerate a beam of cadmium-106 nuclei to nine percent of the speed of light and direct it onto a 1-micron thick lead-208 target foil. During the collision, gamma rays from the cadmium-106 nuclei were emitted and detected by the Gamma-Ray Energy Tracking In-beam Nuclear Array (GRETINA), and the recoiling lead and cadmium nuclei were detected by the Compact Heavy Ion Counter 2 (CHICO2). The intensities of the gamma rays provided a measure of the probability of exciting cadmium-106 nuclei via the electromagnetic interaction, from which the electromagnetic properties of cadmium-106 were established.

    The researchers integrated these properties into a model-independent measure of the nuclear shape and compared the result to expectations from several leading nuclear theories. The results indicate that at low-energies, cadmium-106 is not vibrational but instead more in line with the rotation of a slightly deformed triaxial rotor – a shape akin to a deflated American football.

     

    Funding

    This research was supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, and used resources of Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne National Laboratory.


    Journal Link: Physics Letters. B

    Department of Energy, Office of Science

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  • SLAC, Stanford researchers make a new type of quantum material with a dramatic distortion pattern

    SLAC, Stanford researchers make a new type of quantum material with a dramatic distortion pattern

    Newswise — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have created a new type of quantum material whose atomic scaffolding, or lattice,  has been dramatically warped into a herringbone pattern.

    The resulting distortions are “huge” compared to those achieved in other materials, said Woo Jin Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC who led the study. 

    “This is a very fundamental result, so it’s hard to make predictions about what may or may not come out of it, but the possibilities are exciting,” said SLAC/Stanford Professor and SIMES Director Harold Hwang. 

    “Based on theoretical modeling from members of our team, it looks like the new material has intriguing magnetic, orbital and charge order properties that we plan to investigate further,” he said. Those are some of the very properties that scientists think give quantum materials their surprising characteristics. 

    The research team described their work in a paper published in Nature today.

    High-rises versus octahedrons

    The herringbone-patterned material is the first demonstration of something called the Jahn-Teller (JT) effect in a layered material with a flat, planar lattice, like a high-rise building with evenly spaced floors.  

    The JT effect addresses the dilemma an electron faces when it approaches an ion – an atom that’s missing one or more electrons. 

    Just like a ball rolling along the ground will stop and settle in a low spot, the electron will seek out and occupy the vacancy in the atom’s electron orbitals that has the lowest energy state. But sometimes there are two vacancies with equally low energies. What then? 

    If the ion is in a molecule or embedded in a crystal, the JT effect distorts the surrounding atomic lattice in a way that leaves only one vacancy at the lowest energy state, solving the electron’s problem, Hwang said. 

    And when the whole crystal lattice consists of JT ions, in some cases the overall crystal structure warps, so the electron’s dilemma is cooperatively solved for all the ions. 

    That’s what happened in this study.

    “The Jahn-Teller effect creates strong interactions between the electrons and between the electrons and the lattice,” Hwang said. “This is thought to play key roles in the physics of a number of quantum materials.” 

    The JT effect had already been demonstrated for single molecules and for 3D crystalline materials that consist of ions arranged in octahedral or tetrahedral structures. In fact, JT oxides based on manganese or copper exhibit colossal magnetoresistance and high-temperature superconductivity – leading scientists to wonder what would happen in materials based on other elements or having a different structure.

    In this study, the SIMES researchers turned a material made of cobalt, calcium and oxygen (CaCoO2.5), which has a different stacking of octahedral and tetrahedral layers and is known as brownmillerite,  into a layered material (CaCoO2) where the JT effect could take hold. They did it with a chemical trick developed at SIMES a few years ago to make the superconductivity-nickel-oxide-material”>first nickel oxide superconductor.

    Pulling out Jenga blocks

    Kim synthesized a thin film of brownmillerite and chemically removed single layers of oxygen atoms from its lattice, much like players carefully remove blocks from a Jenga tower. The lattice collapsed and settled into a flat, planar configuration with alternating layers containing negatively charged cobalt ions ­– the JT ions ­– and positively charged calcium ions. 

    Each cobalt ion tried to pull calcium ions from the layers above and below it, Kim said. 

    “This tug-of-war between adjacent layers led to a beautiful pattern of distortions that reflects the best and most harmonious compromise between the forces at play,” he said. “And the resulting lattice distortions are huge compared to those in other materials ­– equal to 25% of the distance between ions in the lattice.”

    Hwang said the research team will be exploring this remarkable new electronic configuration with X-ray tools available at SLAC and elsewhere. “We also wonder what will happen if we can dope this material – replacing some atoms with others to change the number of electrons that are free to move around,” he said. “There are many exciting possibilities.”

    Researchers from Cornell University, the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory in South Korea and the Center for Nanoscale Materials Sciences, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, contributed to this work. It received major funding from the DOE Office of Science and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems Initiative. 

     

    SLAC is a vibrant multiprogram laboratory that explores how the universe works at the biggest, smallest and fastest scales and invents powerful tools used by scientists around the globe. With research spanning particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, materials, chemistry, bio- and energy sciences and scientific computing, we help solve real-world problems and advance the interests of the nation.

    SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

    SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

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  • A Trial Run for Smart Streaming Readouts

    A Trial Run for Smart Streaming Readouts

    The Science

    Nuclear physics experiments are data intensive. Particle accelerators probe collisions of subatomic particles such as protons, neutrons, and quarks to reveal details of the bits that make up matter. Instruments that measure the particles in these experiments generate torrents of raw data. To get a better handle on the data, nuclear physicists are turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning methods. Recent tests of two streaming readout systems that use such methods found that the systems were able to perform real-time processing of raw experimental data. The tests also demonstrated that each system performed well in comparison with traditional systems.

    The Impact

    Streaming readout systems use advanced computer software to collect and analyze data generated by a device in real time. They feature a less complex physical infrastructure than traditional systems. In addition, they can be far more powerful, efficient, faster, and flexible. A streaming readout system can maximize the information that can be extracted from an experiment, from initial decisions about which data to save to flagging unexpected physics captured in very complex detector systems. These systems also store more of the original data for analysis. This allows for a more holistic picture of events by providing the whole of the event instead of just triggering on some small part of it.

    Summary

    Nuclear physics is demanding and getting more so every year. Advances in experiments require powerful software and computing resources to make sense of the extreme amounts of raw data that experiments produce. For instance, the powerful Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) is a Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) that initiates cascades of subatomic particles thousands of times per second. These experiments generate enormous amounts of raw data every day. To harness the data, nuclear physicists have relied on hardware-based “triggered” systems to help them pre-sort data based on timed events. These systems only record data for a short period once a particular event is detected.

    Now, nuclear physicists are replacing triggered systems with software-based streaming readout systems. These systems harness artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to process — in real time — the vast amounts of data that nuclear physics experiments produce. In this way, all data are streamed to a data center to be analyzed, tagged, and filtered. The system automatically sifts through the enormous amount of data to filter out unnecessary background and record the interesting bits. With this work done by a streaming readout system, the actual data analysis can take a fraction of the time.

     

    Funding

    This material is based on work supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Projects of Great Relevance within Italy/U.S. Scientific and Technological Cooperation, and by the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.


    Journal Link: European Physical Journal Plus

    Department of Energy, Office of Science

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  • Brookhaven HSRP and SPARK Program Alumni Selected in 2023 Regeneron Science Talent Search

    Brookhaven HSRP and SPARK Program Alumni Selected in 2023 Regeneron Science Talent Search

    Newswise — Last month, Society for Science (the Society) announced the 300 scholars in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2023. The scholars were each awarded $2,000 and also awarded $2,000 for their school. Scholars were chosen based on their research, leadership skills, community involvement, commitment to academics, creativity in asking scientific questions, and promise as STEM leaders, demonstrated through the submission of their original, independent research projects, essays and recommendations (See the full list of this year’s scholars).

    Two of this year’s scholars were not only students from high schools on Long Island, but also young researchers who participated in two of the intensive educational programs offered at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. Having the hands-on experience of working in a busy laboratory environment, seeing their research being carried out, and collaborating with experts in their fields of interest was a big asset in applying to a competition of this caliber.

    “These programs provide students with an authentic research experience,” said Aleida Perez, Interim Manager of University Relations and Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) and DOE Programs at Brookhaven Lab. “They are able to develop their scientific skills and build a collaborative network for their future educational, and perhaps professional, paths.”

    Jack Shultz, a student at Westhampton Beach high school, was part of the Student Partnerships for Advanced Research and Knowledge (SPARK) Program at Brookhaven Lab last year. In this program, high school students and their science educators become visiting researchers with access to Brookhaven National Laboratory’s scientific facilities. Shultz has a core interest in biology and chemistry, which has led to several research projects and more specific areas of interest.

    “Living on Long Island, it’s easy to take for granted what a unique and incredible environment we have,” said Shultz. “In a short amount of time, you can actually see climate change effects firsthand in things like marine ecosystems or the change in local weather patterns.”

    Shultz has been researching kelp ecosystems on Long Island using the SRX and XPD beamlines at the Lab’s National Synchrotron Light Source II—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility—under the mentorship of Juergen Thieme, science coordinator for the imaging & microscopy program at NSLS-II and Eric Dooryhee, program manager for the Hard X-ray Scattering and Spectroscopy (HXSS) program at NSLS-II.

    “The scientists at the beamlines were so helpful and inclusive,” recalled Schultz. “Their willingness and enthusiasm really pushed the boundaries of my work. Eric and Juergen were so encouraging and informative. There are people here with two doctorates, but they treat high school students like peers. It’s amazing that we have a resource like this locally, and many people may have research ideas that could benefit from it but have no idea it exists or that there are pathways to access it.”

    His experience applying and being selected as a Regeneron scholar and being able to experience what it’s like to do research in a national laboratory setting as part of a team of professional scientists has only reaffirmed Shultz’s enthusiasm for science. He plans to continue his current research and pursue a degree in molecular biology.

    Marc Nichitiu is a high school senior at the Stony Brook School that participated in the lab’s 2022 High School Research Program (HSRP). This competitive six-week program allows high school juniors and seniors to collaborate on a research project with Brookhaven Laboratory staff. Nichitiu was mentored by Igor Zaliznyak, a scientist specializing in Neutron Scattering in Brookhaven Lab’s Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department. Zaliznyak was not only an encouraging mentor, but his advice was also one of the reasons Nichitiu entered the Regeneron competition.

    “At first, I thought that I didn’t really have the time to apply for the scholarship and I simply wanted to focus on my research,” recalled Nichitiu, “but Dr. Zaliznyak really liked the research I was doing and encouraged me to write it up. It’s good practice, in general, to be able to describe what you’ve been doing and explain it to others. Indeed, just the experience of applying was helpful.”

    Nichitiu collaborated with Zaliznyak to characterize the scattering signature of superfluid helium using thermal neutrons. From making balloons float to creating the computer chips in your smartphone, helium is in high demand on earth, but it is not an infinite resource. The need for this element continues to grow, but it is non-renewable noble gas, and the global supply is limited. Nichitiu started his research thinking of how describing neutron scattering signatures could help future space probes seek resources like helium from places beyond the constraints of our own planet. Nichitiu was also fascinated with helium’s behavior at very low temperatures.

    “If you take helium gas and you cool it down below 2.2 Kelvin, you get a special kind of liquid called a super fluid, which has zero viscosity” explained Nichitiu. “Since it has zero friction, it can just creep up the walls or through the tiniest crevices, which makes it really good for leak detection and for powering thermo-mechanical pumps in space. The discovery of the frictionless behavior of superfluid helium marked a cornerstone in modern physics with implications for the study of superconductivity and the universe’s phase transitions following the Big Bang.”

    Both scholars encourage students with a passion for STEM to ignore their doubts and apply. Applications for the 2024 search will be accepted from June of this year into November, leaving plenty of time to start planning out a research project to submit.

    “There’s no harm in applying,” said Nichitiu. “If you’re doing any sort of scientific research that you know you believe has some merit to the scientific community, you should definitely try. Even if it gets rejected, even if it’s not on par with the journals you would want to submit it to, it’s really important to get those basic scientific skills.”

    Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

    Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

    Brookhaven National Laboratory

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  • New quantum sensing technique reveals magnetic connections

    New quantum sensing technique reveals magnetic connections

    Newswise — A research team supported by the Q-NEXT quantum research center demonstrates a new way to use quantum sensors to tease out relationships between microscopic magnetic fields.

    Say you notice a sudden drop in temperature on both your patio and kitchen thermometers. At first, you think it’s because of a cold snap, so you crank up the heat in your home. Then you realize that while the outside has indeed become colder, inside, someone left the refrigerator door open.

    Initially, you thought the temperature drops were correlated. Later, you saw that they weren’t.

    Recognizing when readings are correlated is important not only for your home heating bill but for all of science. It’s especially challenging when measuring properties of atoms.

    Now scientists have developed a method, reported in Science, that enables them to see whether magnetic fields detected by a pair of atom-scale quantum sensors are correlated or not.

    “As far as I know, this is something people hadn’t tried to do, and that’s why we see these correlations where nobody else was able to. You really win from that.” — Shimon Kolkowitz, University of Wisconsin­–Madison

    The research was supported in part by Q-NEXT, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

    The ability to distinguish between standalone and correlated environments at the atomic scale could have enormous impacts in medicine, navigation and discovery science.

    What happened

    A team of scientists at Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison developed and demonstrated a new technique for teasing out whether magnetic fields picked up by multiple quantum sensors are correlated with each other or independent.

    The team focused on a type of diamond-based sensor called a nitrogen-vacancy center, or NV center, which consists of a nitrogen atom next to an atom-sized hole in the crystal of carbon atoms that make up diamond.

    Typically, scientists measure the magnetic field strength at a single NV center by averaging multiple readings. Or they might take an average reading of many NV centers at once.

    While helpful, average values provide only so much information. Knowing that the average temperature in Wisconsin will be 42 degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow tells you little about how much colder it will be at night or in the northern part of the state.

    “If you want to learn not just the value of the magnetic field at one location or at one point in time, but whether there’s a relationship between the magnetic field at one location and the magnetic field at another nearby — there wasn’t really a good way to do that with these NV centers,” said paper co-author Shimon Kolkowitz, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Q-NEXT collaborator.

    The team’s new method uses multiple simultaneous readings of two NV centers. Using sophisticated computation and signal-processing techniques, they obtained information about the relationship between the magnetic fields at both points and could say whether the two readings resulted from the same source.

    “Were they seeing the same magnetic field? Were they seeing a different magnetic field? That’s what we can get from these measurements,” Kolkowitz said. ​“It’s useful information that no one had access to before. We can tell the difference between the global field that both sensors were seeing and those that were local.”

    Why it matters

    Quantum sensors harness the quantum properties of atoms or atom-like systems to pick up tiny signals — such as the magnetic fields arising from the motion of single electrons. These fields are puny: 100,000 times weaker than that of a fridge magnet. Only ultrasensitive tools such as quantum sensors can make measurements at nature’s smallest scales.

    Quantum sensors are expected to be powerful. NV centers, for example, can distinguish features separated by a mere one ten thousandth of the width of a human hair. With that kind of hyperzoom capability, NV centers could be placed in living cells for an inside, up-close look at how they function. Scientists could even use them to pinpoint the causes of disease.

    “What make NVs special is their spatial resolution,” Kolkowitz said. ​“That’s useful for imaging the magnetic fields from an exotic material or seeing the structure of individual proteins.”

    With the Kolkowitz team’s new method for sensing magnetic field strengths at multiple points simultaneously, scientists could one day be able to map atom-level changes in magnetism through time and space.

    How it works

    How did the team make these informative measurements? They got granular.

    Rather than average over many raw values to arrive at the overall magnetic field strength, the researchers kept track of individual readings at each NV center, and then applied a mathematical maneuver called ​“covariance” to the two lists.

    Comparing the covariance-calculated figures — which capture more detail than a couple of raw averages — let them see whether the fields were correlated.

    “We’re doing that averaging differently than what’s been done in the past, so we don’t lose this information in the process of averaging,” Kolkowitz said ​“That’s part of what’s special here.”

    So why hasn’t covariance magnetometry, as the method is called, been tested before now?

    For one, the team had to build an experimental setup for taking simultaneous measurements at multiple NV centers. This microscope was built by the team at Princeton, led by Professor Nathalie de Leon, a member of the Co-Design Center for Quantum Advantage, another DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center, led by Brookhaven National Laboratory.

    For another, covariance magnetometry works only when the individual measurements of these tiny magnetic fields are highly reliable. (A readout is only as good as its contributing measurements.) That’s why the researchers used a special technique called spin-to-charge conversion, which produces a raw reading with more information about the magnetic field for each measurement than other commonly used tools.

    With spin-to-charge conversion, individual measurements take longer. That’s the price scientists pay for higher reliability.

    However, when combined with covariance to measure minuscule, correlated magnetic fields, it saves buckets of time.

    “Using the conventional method, you’d have to average for 10 full days continuously to get one piece of data to say that you saw this correlated nanotesla signal,” Kolkowitz said. ​“Whereas with this new method, it’s an hour or two.”

    By integrating covariance information with spin-to-charge conversion, researchers can gain access to atomic and subatomic details they didn’t have before, supercharging the already powerful capabilities of quantum sensing.

    “As far as I know, this is something people hadn’t tried to do, and that’s why we see these correlations where nobody else was able to,” Kolkowitz said. ​“You really win from that.”

    This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science National Quantum Information Science Research Centers as part of the Q-NEXT center, the National Science Foundation, the Princeton Catalysis Initiative, the DOE, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, a Princeton Quantum Initiative Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

    About Q-NEXT

    Q-NEXT is a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Argonne National Laboratory. Q-NEXT brings together world-class researchers from national laboratories, universities and U.S. technology companies with the goal of developing the science and technology to control and distribute quantum information. Q-NEXT collaborators and institutions will create two national foundries for quantum materials and devices, develop networks of sensors and secure communications systems, establish simulation and network test beds, and train the next-generation quantum-ready workforce to ensure continued U.S. scientific and economic leadership in this rapidly advancing field. For more information, visit https://​q​-next​.org/.

    Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

    The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.

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  • Cybersecurity Defenders Are Expanding Their AI Toolbox

    Cybersecurity Defenders Are Expanding Their AI Toolbox

    Newswise — Scientists have taken a key step toward harnessing a form of artificial intelligence known as deep reinforcement learning, or DRL, to protect computer networks.

    When faced with sophisticated cyberattacks in a rigorous simulation setting, deep reinforcement learning was effective at stopping adversaries from reaching their goals up to 95 percent of the time. The outcome offers promise for a role for autonomous AI in proactive cyber defense.

    Scientists from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory documented their findings in a research paper and presented their work Feb. 14 at a workshop on AI for Cybersecurity during the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Washington, D.C.

    The starting point was the development of a simulation environment to test multistage attack scenarios involving distinct types of adversaries. Creation of such a dynamic attack-defense simulation environment for experimentation itself is a win. The environment offers researchers a way to compare the effectiveness of different AI-based defensive methods under controlled test settings.

    Such tools are essential for evaluating the performance of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The method is emerging as a powerful decision-support tool for cybersecurity experts—a defense agent with the ability to learn, adapt to quickly changing circumstances, and make decisions autonomously. While other forms ofAI are standard to detect intrusions or filter spam messages, deep reinforcement learning expands defenders’ abilities to orchestrate sequential decision-making plans in their daily face-off with adversaries.

    Deep reinforcement learning offers smarter cybersecurity, the ability to detect changes in the cyber landscape earlier, and the opportunity to take preemptive steps to scuttle a cyberattack.

     

    DRL: Decisions in a broad attack space

    “An effective AI agent for cybersecurity needs to sense, perceive, act and adapt, based on the information it can gather and on the results of decisions that it enacts,” said Samrat Chatterjee, a data scientist who presented the team’s work. “Deep reinforcement learning holds great potential in this space, where the number of system states and action choices can be large.”

    DRL, which combines reinforcement learning and deep learning, is especially adept in situations where a series of decisions in a complex environment need to be made. Good decisions leading to desirable results are reinforced with a positive reward (expressed as a numeric value); bad choices leading to undesirable outcomes are discouraged via a negative cost.

    It’s similar to how people learn many tasks. A child who does their chores might receive positive reinforcement with a desired playdate; a child who doesn’t do their work gets negative reinforcement, like the takeaway of a digital device.

    “It’s the same concept in reinforcement learning,” Chatterjee said. “The agent can choose from a set of actions. With each action comes feedback, good or bad, that becomes part of its memory. There’s an interplay between exploring new opportunities and exploiting past experiences. The goal is to create an agent that learns to make good decisions.”

     

    Open AI Gym and MITRE ATT&CK

    The team used an open-source software toolkit known as Open AI Gym as a basis to create a custom and controlled simulation environment to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of four deep reinforcement learning algorithms.

    The team used the MITRE ATT&CK framework, developed by MITRE Corp., and incorporated seven tactics and 15 techniques deployed by three distinct adversaries. Defenders were equipped with 23 mitigation actions to try to halt or prevent the progression of an attack.

    Stages of the attack included tactics of reconnaissance, execution, persistence, defense evasion, command and control, collection and exfiltration (when data is transferred out of the system). An attack was recorded as a win for the adversary if they successfully reached the final exfiltration stage.

    “Our algorithms operate in a competitive environment—a contest with an adversary intent on breaching the system,” said Chatterjee. “It’s a multistage attack, where the adversary can pursue multiple attack paths that can change over time as they try to go from reconnaissance to exploitation. Our challenge is to show how defenses based on deep reinforcement learning can stop such an attack.”

     

    DQN outpaces other approaches

    The team trained defensive agents based on four deep reinforcement learning algorithms: DQN (Deep Q-Network) and three variations of what’s known as the actor-critic approach. The agents were trained with simulated data about cyberattacks, then tested against attacks that they had not observed in training.

    DQN performed the best.

    • Least sophisticated attacks (based on varying levels of adversary skill and persistence): DQN stopped 79 percent of attacks midway through attack stages and 93 percent by the final stage.
    • Moderately sophisticated attacks: DQN stopped 82 percent of attacks midway and 95 percent by the final stage.
    • Most sophisticated attacks: DQN stopped 57 percent of attacks midway and 84 percent by the final stage—far higher than the other three algorithms.

    “Our goal is to create an autonomous defense agent that can learn the most likely next step of an adversary, plan for it, and then respond in the best way to protect the system,” Chatterjee said.

    Despite the progress, no one is ready to entrust cyber defense entirely up to an AI system. Instead, a DRL-based cybersecurity system would need to work in concert with humans, said coauthor Arnab Bhattacharya, formerly of PNNL.

    “AI can be good at defending against a specific strategy but isn’t as good at understanding all the approaches an adversary might take,” Bhattacharya said. “We are nowhere near the stage where AI can replace human cyber analysts. Human feedback and guidance are important.”

    In addition to Chatterjee and Bhattacharya, authors of the AAAI workshop paper include Mahantesh Halappanavar of PNNL and Ashutosh Dutta, a former PNNL scientist. The work was funded by DOE’s Office of Science. Some of the early work that spurred this specific research was funded by PNNL’s Mathematics for Artificial Reasoning in Science initiative through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

    # # #

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  • New Sodium, Aluminum Battery Aims to Integrate Renewables for Grid Resiliency

    New Sodium, Aluminum Battery Aims to Integrate Renewables for Grid Resiliency

    Newswise — RICHLAND, Wash.—A new battery design could help ease integration of renewable energy into the nation’s electrical grid at lower cost, using Earth-abundant metals, according to a study just published in Energy Storage Materials. A research team, led by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, demonstrated that the new design for a grid energy storage battery built with the low-cost metals sodium and aluminum provides a pathway towards a safer and more scalable stationary energy storage system.

    “We showed that this new molten salt battery design has the potential to charge and discharge much faster than other conventional high-temperature sodium batteries, operate at a lower temperature, and maintain an excellent energy storage capacity,” said Guosheng Li, a materials scientist at PNNL and the principal investigator of the research. “We are getting similar performance with this new sodium-based chemistry at over 100 °C [212 °F] lower temperatures than commercially available high-temperature sodium battery technologies, while using a more Earth-abundant material.”

    More energy storage delivered

    Imre Gyuk, director of DOE’s Office of Electricity, Energy Storage Program, which supported this research, noted “This battery technology, which is built with low-cost domestically available materials brings us one step closer toward meeting our nation’s clean energy goals.”

    The new sodium-based molten salt battery uses two distinct reactions. The team previously reported a neutral molten salt reaction. The new discovery shows that this neutral molten salt can undergo a further reaction into an acidic molten salt. Crucially, this second acidic reaction mechanism increases the battery’s capacity. Specifically, after 345 charge/discharge cycles at high current, this acidic reaction mechanism retained 82.8 percent of peak charge capacity.

    The energy that a battery can deliver in the discharge process is called its specific energy density, which is expressed as “watt hour per kilogram” (Wh/kg). Although the battery is in early-stage or  “coin cell” testing, the researchers speculate that it could result in a practical energy density of up to 100 Wh/kg. In comparison, the energy density for lithium-ion batteries used in commercial electronics and electric vehicles is around 170–250 Wh/kg. However, the new sodium-aluminum battery design has the advantage of being inexpensive and easy to produce in the United States from much more abundant materials.

    “With optimization, we expect the specific energy density and the life cycle could reach even higher and longer,” added Li.

    Sodium battery shows its mettle

    Indeed, PNNL scientists collaborated with colleagues at the U.S.-based renewable energy pioneer Nexceris to assemble and test the battery. Nexceris, through their new business Adena Power, supplied their patented solid-state, sodium-based electrolyte to PNNL to test the battery’s performance. This crucial battery component allows the sodium ions to travel from the negative (anode) to the positive (cathode) side of the battery as it charges.

    “Our primary goal for this technology is to enable low-cost, daily shifting of solar energy into the electrical grid over a 10- to 24-hour period,” said Vince Sprenkle, a PNNL battery technology expert with more than 30 patented designs for energy storage systems and associated technology. “This is a sweet spot where we can start to think about integrating higher levels of renewables into the electrical grid to provide true grid resiliency from renewable resources such as wind and solar power.”

    Sprenkle was part of the team that developed this battery’s new flexible design, which also shifted the battery from a traditional tubular shape to a flat, scalable one that can more easily be stacked and expanded as the technology develops from coin-sized batteries to a larger grid-scale demonstration size. More importantly, this flat cell design allows the cell capacity to be increased by simply using a thicker cathode, which the researchers leveraged in this work to demonstrate a triple capacity cell with sustained discharge of 28.2-hours under laboratory conditions.

    Most current battery technologies, including lithium-ion batteries, are well suited for short-term energy storage. To meet the demand for 10-plus hours of energy storage will require the development of new, low-cost, safe, and long duration battery concepts beyond current state-of-the-art battery technologies. This research provides a promising lab-scale demonstration toward that goal.

    Variation on a grid resilience theme

    The ability to store energy generated by renewable energy and release it on demand to the electrical grid has driven rapid advances in battery technology, with many new designs competing for attention and customers. Each new variation must satisfy the demands of its own niche use. Some batteries, such as those having PNNL’s freeze-thaw battery design, are capable of storing energy generated seasonally for months at a time.

    Compared with a seasonal battery, this new design is especially adept at short- to medium-term grid energy storage over 12 to 24 hours. It is a variation of what’s called a sodium-metal halide battery. A similar design employing a nickel cathode as part of the system has been shown effective at commercial scale and is already commercially available.

    “We have eliminated the need for nickel, a relatively scarce and expensive element, without sacrificing battery performance,” said Li. “Another advantage of using aluminum over nickel is that the aluminum cathode charges more quickly, which is crucial to enable the longer discharge duration demonstrated in this work.”

    With this milestone reached, the team is focusing on further improvements to increase the discharge duration, which could greatly improve grid flexibility for greater incorporation of renewable power sources.

    And because it operates at a lower temperature, it can be manufactured with inexpensive battery materials, instead of requiring more complex and expensive components and processes as in conventional high-temperature sodium batteries, said David Reed, a PNNL battery expert and study co-author.

    More grid energy storage at lower cost

    In 2023, the state-of-the-art for grid energy storage using lithium-ion batteries is about four hours of energy storage capacity, said Sprenkle. “This new system could significantly increase the amount of stored energy capacity if we can reach the expected cost targets for materials and manufacturing,” he added.

    As part of the study, the researchers estimated that a sodium-aluminum battery design based on inexpensive raw materials could cost just $7.02 per kWh for the active materials. Through optimization and increasing the practical energy density, they project that this cost could be lowered even further. This promising low-cost, grid-scale storage technology could enable intermittent renewables like wind and solar power to contribute more dynamically to the nation’s electrical grid.

    Neil Kidner, a study co-author and president of Adena Power, a sodium solid-state battery manufacturer, is collaborating with PNNL to advance sodium-based battery technology. “This research demonstrates that our sodium electrolyte works not only with our patented technology but also with a sodium-aluminum battery design,” he said. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with the PNNL research team towards advancing sodium battery technology.”

    The research was supported by the DOE Office of Electricity and the International Collaborative Energy Technology R&D Program of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning. The electrolyte development was supported by a DOE Small Business Innovation Research program. The nuclear magnetic resonance measurements were made in EMSL, Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science User Facility sponsored by the Biological and Environmental Research program.

    Learn more about PNNL’s grid modernization research, and the Grid Storage Launchpad, opening in 2024.

    ​About PNNL

    Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in sustainable energy and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science. For more information on PNNL, visit PNNL’s News Center. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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  • George Crabtree, energy trailblazer remembered as a ​“great listener” and ​“boundless explorer”, dead at 78

    George Crabtree, energy trailblazer remembered as a ​“great listener” and ​“boundless explorer”, dead at 78

    Newswise — Distinguished researcher led Argonne’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research and made pivotal discoveries in high-temperature superconductors.

    George Crabtree, widely recognized and admired as a brilliant, passionate materials scientist and champion of superconducting materials and better batteries, died Jan. 23. He was 78.

    As the director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) and a preeminent proponent of decarbonization, Crabtree reached the pinnacle of a career that spanned parts of seven decades at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and that advanced a number of different disciplines and inspired colleagues and friends.

    “I never could have imagined when I first came to Argonne as an undergraduate student that one day I would be directing a big energy storage hub,” Crabtree said recently. ​“That was the farthest thing from my mind. Now I consider that to be one of my best experiences.”

    “As a scientist and a leader, George worked with true integrity and exemplified Argonne’s mission of engaging with some of the biggest challenges facing humanity,” said Argonne Director Paul Kearns. ​“His interest in science and genuine concern for others resulted in a leadership style that was empowering and motivating to generations of colleagues. George had the exceptional ability to bring people together to achieve impactful science for our country.”

    George Crabtree was born on Nov. 28, 1944, in Little Rock, Arkansas, and moved with his family to Illinois when he was 2.

    As a boy, Crabtree was ​“fascinated by the natural world and sought to understand it in all of its complexity,” said JCESR research integration leader Lynn Trahey, whom Crabtree mentored for the past ten years. ​“He told me that when he was young, he was just as interested in biology as physics — he was a boundless explorer.”

    Crabtree first joined Argonne as an intern in 1964 while a college student at Northwestern University. He was hired full-time in 1969 while pursuing his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he took night classes while working.

    In the first part of his career in the last decades of the 20th century, Crabtree’s work focused on the behavior of superconducting materials, in particular their behavior in high magnetic fields. At the time, these materials were mysterious and not well understood, and their mystique held appeal for Crabtree. ​“For me, it was always a curiosity question,” he told the MRS Bulletin.

    Crabtree helped pioneer early research into high-temperature superconductors, which were discovered in 1986. In them, he discovered new phases of superconducting vortex matter. ​“The properties of vortices are important because they are responsible for all the electromagnetic behavior in high-temperature superconductors that could eventually make them useful for applications,” said Argonne materials scientist Ulrich Welp

    “George was a great leader because he had high standards; he elevated everyone around him because he really set an example for everyone else,” said Argonne materials scientist Wai-Kwong Kwok.

    “His leadership style was full of kindness and curiosity,” Trahey said. ​“He wanted to learn and explore and also have a positive impact on society — he was unlimited in what he wanted to learn if it could help him communicate challenges and inspire people.”

    Kwok recalled camping trips that Crabtree would organize for the other scientists in Argonne’s materials science division and their families. ​“He’d be the one up before everyone else making breakfast by the campfire,” he said. ​“In everything, he was truly an endearing person; he cared about more than just work, and his optimism and his hope would just rub off on you.”

    Crabtree’s work on superconductors gained him recognition as a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Sciences. At Argonne, he was named a Distinguished Fellow. In 2003, Crabtree won the second ever Kammerlingh Onnes Prize, an international award given to scientists doing work in superconductivity.

    “George was always a great listener, he would listen to everyone’s input and come up with a solution everyone could agree upon,” Kwok said. ​“There would always be something for everyone.”

    In 2012, Crabtree switched gears professionally when he was named director of JCESR. ​“George was educating himself on battery science along with the postdocs and graduate students,” Trahey said. ​“He was never afraid to ask a question, and he treated 19-year-old students and heads of state with equal respect.”

    As director of JCESR, Crabtree oversaw experiments on a wide range of beyond lithium-ion battery chemistries, including redox flow batteries and multivalent batteries. ​“In the later stage of his career, George was deeply passionate about fighting climate change, and used all his skills to encourage conversations and solutions,” Trahey said.

    “George was a leader in many Basic Energy Science (BES) advisory committee studies and BES workshops. He helped to identify priority research directions for basic science from grand challenges for discovery research to foundations for energy technologies. These reports have literally shaped the BES strategic planning and portfolio for the past decade,” said Harriet Kung, deputy director for Science Programs for DOE’s Office of Science. ​“He was a true renaissance scientist — impacting many disciplines across energy and condensed matter physics. He will be greatly missed by the DOE community.”

    In addition to his work in JCESR, Crabtree also served as co-chair of Argonne’s Action Collaborative, a group of researchers and administrators dedicated to eradicating sexual harassment in the workplace. ​“George cared about making work and life better, more inclusive and more fair for everyone,” Trahey said. ​“He was someone who believed in you and inspired you to believe in yourself.”

    Crabtree is survived by his wife Barbara, a stepson and three grandchildren.

    The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), a DOE Energy Innovation Hub, is a major partnership that integrates researchers from many disciplines to overcome critical scientific and technical barriers and create new breakthrough energy storage technology. Led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, partners include national leaders in science and engineering from academia, the private sector, and national laboratories. Their combined expertise spans the full range of the technology-development pipeline from basic research to prototype development to product engineering to market delivery.

    Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

    The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.

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  • Discovering Unique Microbes Made Easy with DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase)

    Discovering Unique Microbes Made Easy with DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase)

    The Science

    Microbes are foundational for life on Earth. These tiny organisms play a major role in everything from transforming sunlight into the fundamental molecules of life. They help to produce much of the oxygen in our atmosphere. They even cycle nutrients between air and soil. Scientists are constantly finding interactions between microbes and plants, animals, and other macroscopic lifeforms. As genomic sequencing has advanced, researchers can investigate not only isolated microbes, but also whole communities of microorganisms – known as microbiomes – based on DNA found in an environment. The genomes extracted from these communities (metagenomic sequences) can identify the organisms that carry out biogeochemical processes, contribute to health or disease in human gastrointestinal microbiomes, or interact with plant roots in the rhizosphere. The Department of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) recently released a suite of features and a protocol for performing sophisticated microbiome analysis that can accelerate research in microbial ecology.

    The Impact

    The widespread adoption of DNA sequencing in microbiology has generated huge amounts of genomic data. Researchers need computational tools to recover high-quality genomes from environmental samples to understand which organisms live in an environment and how they might interact. The combination of usability, data, and bioinformatics tools in a public online resource makes KBase a uniquely powerful web platform for performing this task. These new features in KBase will allow biologists to obtain genomes from microbiome sequences with easy-to-use software powered by Department of Energy computational resources. This will reduce the time required to process sequencing data and characterize genomes. Scientists can use KBase to collaboratively analyze genomics data and build research communities to solve common problems in microbial ecology.

    Summary

    Obtaining genomes of uncultivated microbes directly from the environment using DNA sequencing is a recent advance that allows scientists to discover and characterize novel organisms. Sequencing the DNA of all the microbes in a given environment produces a “metagenome.” Performing genetic analysis of metagenomes has emerged as a way to explore microbial traits and behaviors and community interactions in an environmental context. Methods for obtaining metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) have varying degrees of success, depending on the techniques used. An increasing number of researchers generate microbiome sequences, but many do not have ready access to the expertise, tools, and computational resources necessary to extract, evaluate, and analyze their genomes.

    The KBase team added and updated several metagenome analysis tools, data types, and execution capabilities to provide researchers the tools that accelerate the discovery of microbial genomes and uncover the genetic potential of microbial communities. A recent paper in Nature Protocols presents a series of analysis steps, using KBase apps and data products for extracting high quality MAGs from metagenomes. These capabilities, including computing, data storage, and sharing of data and analyses, are provided free to the public via the KBase web platform. This protocol allows scientists to both generate putative genomes from organisms only found in the environment and analyze them with tools to understand who they are, what they are doing, who they are interacting with, and their role in the ecosystem.

     

    Funding

    KBase is funded by the Genomic Science Program in the Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research.


    Journal Link: Nature Protocols

    Department of Energy, Office of Science

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  • Brookhaven Lab Battery Scientist, Hydrogeologist, and DOE Site Office Manager Among Secretary of Energy’s 2022 Honorees

    Brookhaven Lab Battery Scientist, Hydrogeologist, and DOE Site Office Manager Among Secretary of Energy’s 2022 Honorees

    Newswise — UPTON, NY—On January 24, 2023, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm honored 44 teams with the Secretary of Energy Achievement Award and five individuals for their work. Among the recipients are Distinguished Professor Esther Takeuchi, a battery researcher with a joint appointment at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University; Douglas Paquette, a hydrogeologist in Brookhaven Lab’s Environmental Protection Division; and Robert Gordon, manager of the DOE-Brookhaven Site Office that oversees operations at Brookhaven Lab.

    “These awards are among the highest forms of internal, non-monetary recognition DOE Federal and contractor employees can receive,” Secretary Granholm said in a statement. “They are bestowed on individuals and teams in recognition of service which goes above and beyond, and for contributions having lasting impacts on both DOE and on our great Nation. Along with the entire DOE leadership team, I am so proud of the accomplishments of our award recipients. Their commitment to achieving DOE’s mission is an inspiration.”

    Takeuchi was honored for her role on an 80-member team of scientists and support staff from across the DOE National Laboratory complex who facilitated eight virtual panel discussions as part of a Congressional briefing series entitled “Driving U.S. Competitiveness & Innovation: A New Era of Science for Transformative Industry.” The team created a platform for American industry leaders and National Laboratory scientists to speak directly with Congressional staffers. Their goal was to discuss the productivity of public-private collaborations to accelerate emergent technologies and American leadership in artificial intelligence, microelectronics, quantum information sciences, the bioeconomy, and materials and chemistry for clean energy.

    This effort highlighted how capabilities at DOE National Laboratories and their User Facilities (including the National Synchrotron Light Source II and Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven Lab) have been used to advance cutting-edge industries and American technical leadership. The discussions also emphasized how partnerships between DOE-supported researchers and American companies can accelerate the Nation’s competitiveness and innovation and address workforce development challenges to prepare for these emergent industries in ways that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

    “I was delighted to participate in the topic of ‘Materials and Chemistry for Clean Energy,’” Takeuchi said. “This forum provided a venue to discuss the opportunity for impact of federally funded research and the national labs in strengthening U.S. industrial competitiveness. My discussions featured energy storage as critical to the clean energy transformation including electrifying transportation and adoption of clean energy generation.”

    Paquette and Gordon both served on a team honored for helping DOE formulate a strategy for addressing the impacts of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are a class of widely manufactured chemicals that in recent years have been identified as emerging contaminants of concern in many communities across the United States. Historically, they have been widely used in products such as nonstick pans, water-repellent clothing, and firefighting foams. 

    National focus on PFAS has led to a wide array of Federal and state-level regulatory approaches and policy initiatives. The PFAS Policy Development Team, made up of representatives from multiple DOE offices, coordinated efforts within the DOE and with external stakeholders to better understand and manage the regulations, risks, and liabilities associated with these substances.

    This work enabled DOE to gather information about current and past uses of PFAS; develop policies, guidance documents, and educational materials to support more effective efforts to manage PFAS-related liabilities and constructively engage with internal and external stakeholders; and identify research needs and opportunities to support DOE efforts to develop solutions to PFAS challenges. The coordinated efforts of this team have positioned DOE to engage constructively on an issue of high-level national concern in an informed, proactive, and effective manner.

    “I am honored to be part of the team that was recognized by the Secretary of Energy,” Paquette said. “Over the past four years, the DOE has been proactive in trying to understand the extent of PFAS contamination resulting from past operations and to prevent any new impacts to the environment.”

    The PFAS team recently produced three noteworthy documents including the DOE PFAS Roadmap, the DOE Initial site-by-site PFAS survey, and the DOE Initial PFAS Research and Development Plan. These documents can be found on DOE’s PFAS website at Energy.gov/pfas.

    “Each of these documents highlights Brookhaven Lab’s contributions to PFAS R&D solutions, novel approaches to PFAS remediation, and transparency with the community and regulators,” said Gordon. “It’s not a coincidence that Brookhaven Lab is prominent in DOE’s key PFAS documents; it is because of Brookhaven’s recognized expertise, experience, and willingness to serve as a resource across the DOE enterprise.”

    Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

    Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

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