Feature Articles

Physicists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a measurement technique to better understand beam loss--stray particles that travel outside the confinement fields of a particle accelerator. Mitigating beam loss is paramount to realizing more powerful accelerators at smaller scales and lower costs.

A team at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used two DOE supercomputers, together with a machine learning program called Eureqa, to find a new extrapolation formula from existing fusion device data to the future the ITER device. The team then completed new simulations that confirm their previous ones, which showed that in full-power ITER, the component that removes exhaust heat may be more likely to maintain its integrity than was predicted by the current trend.

The U.S. Air Force and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new high-performance weather forecasting computer system that will provide a platform for some of the most advanced weather modeling in the world.

Using the nation's fastest supercomputer, Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a team of nuclear physicists developed a promising method for measuring quark interactions in hadrons and applied the method to simulations using quarks with close-to-physical masses.

To investigate what happens inside cells when they are at risk of becoming cancerous, scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have been using neutron scattering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team is searching to better understand the altered state of the nucleolus--a membrane-less organelle inside the cell--when the cell is compromised. Novel insights into cell behavior at the atomic and molecular scales will enable better detection and treatment of cancer in its many forms.

As Hurricane Dorian raged through the Bahamas, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory worked around the clock to aid recovery efforts for one of the Caribbean's worst storms ever, providing geographic data that guided decisions on everything from where to open emergency shelters to how to staff first-aid centers.

The COHERENT experiment makes the most of the Spallation Neutron Source's neutrino factory with five detectors sited along a 164-foot, or 50-meter, long hallway that has come to be called Neutrino Alley. Here, Marcel Demarteau, director of the Physics Division at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, explains its successes and possibilities.

A Georgia State University team has used the nation's fastest supercomputer, the IBM AC922 Summit at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to find the optimal path that one E. coli enzyme uses to switch between building and editing DNA to rapidly remove misincorporated pieces of DNA.

Led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a new study clears up a discrepancy regarding the biggest contributor of unwanted background signals in specialized detectors of neutrinos. Better characterization of background could improve current and future experiments to detect real signals from these weakly interacting, electrically neutral subatomic particles and understand their role in the universe.

As ORNL's fuel properties technical lead for the U.S. Department of Energy's Co-Optimization of Fuel and Engines, or Co-Optima, initiative, Jim Szybist has been on a quest for the past few years to identify the most significant indicators for predicting how a fuel will perform in engines designed for light-duty vehicles such as passenger cars and pickup trucks.