Imagine if carbon dioxide (CO2) could easily be converted into usable energy. Every time you breathe or drive a motor vehicle, you would produce a key ingredient for generating fuels. Like photosynthesis in plants, we could turn CO2 into molecules that are essential for day-to-day life. Now, scientists are one step closer.

If you have ever watched television in anything but total darkness or used a computer while sitting underneath overhead lighting or near a window, you have experienced a major nuisance of modern display screens: glare. Most of today’s electronics devices are equipped with glass or plastic covers for protection against dust, moisture, and other environmental contaminants, but light reflection from these surfaces can make information displaye...

Aligning a sequence of amplifiers and mirrors with hair-thin precision on a tabletop anchored to a steel block deep underground, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have produced a powerful green laser. The light - the highest average power green laser ever generated by a single fiber-based laser - will be crucial to experiments in nuclear physics at the Lab's Relativistic Heavy I...

The Brookhaven National Laboratory is highlighting some of the work it’s been doing to provide radioactive medical isotopes to the clinical community. At Brookhaven, for example, a generator for producing technetium-99m out of molybdenum-99 was developed decades ago, and the technology is used today daily to help treat cancer patients. They lab is also responsible for developing 18FDG, a glucose molecule with a radiotracer attached to it.

Building nanomaterials with features spanning just billionths of a meter requires extraordinary precision. Scaling up that construction while increasing complexity presents a significant hurdle to the widespread use of such nano-engineered materials. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a way to efficiently create scalable, multilayer, multi-patterned nanoscale structures with unpre...

Scientists studying high temperature superconductors-materials that carry electric current with no energy loss when cooled below a certain temperature-have been searching for ways to study in detail the electron interactions thought to drive this promising property. One big challenge is disentangling the many different types of interactions-for example, separating the effects of electrons interacting with one another from those caused by their in...

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory used a high-resolution electron microscope to study nanoscale details of catalytic particles made of nickel and cobalt-inexpensive alternatives to the costly platinum used in most fuel cells today. A paper describing the research in the journal Nature Communications includes 3D, dynamic images that reveal how the particles' external and internal structure...

Many people picture electrical conductivity as the flow of charged particles (mainly electrons) without really thinking about the atomic structure of the material through which those charges are moving. But scientists who study "strongly correlated electron" materials such as high-temperature superconductors and those with strong responses to magnetism know that picture is far too simplistic. They know that the atoms play a crucial role in determ...

  A team of scientists studying solar cells made from cadmium telluride, a promising alternative to silicon, has discovered that microscopic "fault lines" within and between crystals of the material act as conductive pathways that ease the flow of electric current.

An ultra-high-vacuum chamber with temperatures approaching absolute zero—the coldest anything can get—may be the last place you would expect to find gold. But a group of researchers from Stony Brook University (SBU) in collaboration with scientists at the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have just demonstrated that such a desolate place is ideal for producing cataly...

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have an explanation for why the temperature at which cuprates become superconducting is so high. After growing and analysing thousands of samples of a cuprate known as LSCO for the four elements it contains (lanthanum, strontium, copper, and oxygen), they determined that this "critical" temperature is controlled by the density of electron pairs—the number of ...

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have created an imaging technique that allows scientists to probe the internal makeup of a battery during charging and discharging using different x-ray energies while rotating the battery cell. The technique produces a 3D chemical map and lets the scientists track chemical reactions in the battery over time in working conditions. Their work is published in Nature Commu...

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have just developed a way to direct the self-assembly of multiple molecular patterns within a single material, producing nanoscale architectures. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications. "This is a significant conceptual leap in self-assembly," said Brookhaven Lab physicist Aaron Stein, lead author on the study.

A team of physicists and engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory has just completed preliminary tests of a 20-ton cylindrical magnet that could form the heart of an upgraded particle detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The goal was to see if the superconducting solenoid was in working order after having sat idle for 8 years, and then traveling cross-country from California to Brookhaven last...

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell University, and collaborators have produced the first direct evidence of a state of electronic matter first predicted by theorists in 1964. The discovery, described in a paper published in Nature, may provide insights into the workings of high-temperature superconductors. The prediction was that "Cooper pairs" of electrons in a superconductor could exist in two ...

Art Sedlacek, an atmospheric scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, has gone to extreme lengths to study aerosols—tiny particles emitted from factories, forest fires, car exhaust, and sometimes from natural sources. He has flown on planes outfitted with high tech equipment through wildfire plumes and over the ocean, and has visited stations all over the globe to observe these particles and understand th...

Scientists at the U.S Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have discovered a new way to generate very low-resistance electric current in a new class of materials. The discovery, which relies on the separation of right- and left-'handed' particles, points to a range of potential applications in energy, quantum computing and medical imaging, and possibly even a new mechanism for inducing superconduc...

Graphene, the two-dimensional powerhouse, packs extreme durability, electrical conductivity, and transparency into a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon. Despite being heralded as a breakthrough 'wonder material', graphene has been slow to leap into commercial and industrial products and processes.

Sunlight absorbed by organic solar cells must first navigate a nanoscale gauntlet before becoming useable electricity. After hitting the light-absorbing material of the solar cell, called the photoactive layer, absorbed sunlight excites electrons, freeing them to find their way through a maze filled with twists, turns, dead-ends, and collisions. Only the free charges that successfully make it through this maze can be used in a circuit as electric...