Feature Stories

Gazing out on a freshwater pond, you may see tiny green plants with oval shaped leaves floating in clusters. In overgrown ponds, these plants coat the water’s surface. These plants – called duckweed or water lentils – can grow so fast that they can double their numbers in just one to two days. But what you can’t see in that pond is the evolutionary battle between the plants and microbes trying to invade them. 

For the first time, the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will run equipment developed at its research facilities on a commercially available quantum network at EPB Quantum Network powered by Qubitekk. Starting this month, ORNL is testing its Automatic Polarization Compensation, or APC, a key technology needed to convey quantum data across a network while maintaining all its complexities and probabilities. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, or UTC, the first American university to host a permanent connection to a commercially available quantum network, is also participating in the effort to validate the technology's commercial viability.

After years of preparation, the first neutrinos have been observed by the Short-Baseline Near Detector collaboration. The data SBND collects will expand our knowledge of how neutrinos interact with matter and will be used to search for evidence of new physics.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Western Michigan University researchers demonstrated pavement markers that use embedded microchips to transmit road shape information to self-driving cars. The technology, demonstrated to government officials in Chattanooga, TN, helps self-driving cars navigate in all weather conditions and outperformed commercial systems on roads with steep curves.

A unique manufacturing program for large metal parts holds promise to help revitalize American manufacturing and return clean energy manufacturing technologies to the United States. The approach could greatly reduce waiting times for critical components and enable economic growth in the manufacturing sector for energy, according to scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Quantum Systems Accelerator (QSA), led by Berkeley Lab with Sandia National Laboratories as the lead partner, is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Quantum Information Science Research center that focuses on all three major technologies for quantum computing: superconducting circuits, trapped-ion systems, and neutral atoms. Due to this multi-institution collaboration, novel research developments in neutral atom systems are breaking new ground for quantum information processing.

Steve Farrell, a research associate at the Inner-Shell Spectroscopy (ISS) beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, has recently been selected as one of 2024’s Distinguished Goldhaber Fellows. Farrell is eager to use this time to pursue projects focused on clean, affordable energy that leverage his experience and expertise in chemistry and materials science.

Hua pioneers computer codes that can improve safety and efficiency of molten salt reactors.