NEWS RELEASES

Four physicists from Rice University have received a $4.4 million grant over three years from the U.S. Department of Energy to establish the Rice Laboratory for Emergent Magnetic Materials (RLEMM). This new research center will investigate the fundamental interactions of magnetism and its role in next-generation technologies.

A new AI can fill in missing sensor data for fusion systems, offering even more detail than the real-world sensor could have provided. The AI, known as Diag2Diag, could prove essential for commercial fusion energy production by helping to reduce costs and ensure reliability. Diag2Diag also provided new support for a leading theory about controlling plasma disruptions, bringing us closer to using fusion to generate electricity for the power grid. Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Princeton University were part of an international team behind the research, which was recently published in Nature Communications.

A team of researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities College of Science and Engineering and the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering has discovered and measured the fraction of an electron that makes catalytic manufacturing possible. This discovery provides insight for designing new breakthrough catalytic materials that could lead to more efficient and lower-cost manufacturing of fuels and chemicals.

Over the next decade, aluminum auto body scrap will flood salvage systems, much of it too impure for reuse in critical parts. ORNL researchers developed RidgeAlloy, a new aluminum alloy that turns low-value scrap into a reliable, high-value domestic supply for structural automotive manufacturing.

Caltech physicists have created the largest qubit array ever assembled: 6,100 neutral-atom qubits trapped in a grid by lasers. Previous arrays of this kind contained only hundreds of qubits.   

New simulations of neutron star mergers reveal that the mixing and changing of tiny particles called neutrinos impacts how the merger unfolds, as well as the resulting emissions. The findings have implications for longstanding questions about the origins of metals and rare earth elements as well as understanding physics in extreme environments.