News Releases

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, entered its 25^th and final year of operations, smashing together the nuclei of gold atoms traveling close to the speed of light.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument used millions of galaxies and quasars to build the largest 3D map of our universe to date. Combining their data with other experiments shows signs that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time — and the standard model of how the universe works may need an update.

A new data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is now available for researchers to explore. The collection contains information on 18.7 million galaxies, quasars, and stars — the largest dataset of its kind ever shared.

Scientists are exploring how web search engine technology might also keep the lights on, the water running and the trains moving.

Physicists have created a new computer code that could speed up the design of the complicated magnets that shape the plasma in stellarators, making the systems simpler and more affordable to build.

Scientists have discovered “berkelocene,” the first organometallic molecule to be characterized containing the heavy element berkelium. The breakthrough disrupts long-held theories about the chemistry of the elements that follow uranium in the periodic table. 

A new study led by researchers at Berkeley Lab outlines a way to engineer pseudo-bonds in materials. Instead of forming chemical bonds, which is what makes epoxies and other composites so tough, the chains of molecules entangle in a way that is fully reversible.

Working at nanoscale dimensions, billionths of a meter in size, a team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory revealed a new way to measure high-speed fluctuations in magnetic materials. Knowledge obtained by these new measurements, published in Nano Letters, could be used to advance technologies ranging from traditional computing to the emerging field of quantum computing.

Data scientists and developers at Jefferson Lab are exploring some of the latest artificial intelligence techniques to help make high-performance computers more reliable and less costly to run. The study deploys machine learning models that are trained to monitor and predict the behavior of a scientific computing cluster. The goal is to help system administrators quickly identify and respond to troublesome computing jobs or hardware behavior, reducing downtime for scientists processing data from their experiments.

Using the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers have developed a new technique that predicts nuclear properties in record detail. The study revealed how the structure of a nucleus relates to the force that holds it together. This understanding could advance efforts in quantum physics and across a variety of sectors, from to energy production to national security.