Powerful X-rays watch solid state batteries charging and discharging

08-Feb-2021

Despite worldwide use of lithium batteries, the exact dynamics of their operation has remained elusive. X-rays have proven to be a powerful tool for peering inside of these batteries to see the changes that occur in real time. Using the ultrabright X-rays of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a ...

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The answer has been there all along

04-Nov-2019

Producing structurally perfect graphene and other 2D materials is the secret to tapping into their potential novel electronic and spintronic properties. But how do we know when graphene, the most widely studied 2D material, is perfect-- a defect-free and uniform layer of atoms? Scientists at the ...

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05-Apr-2019

Chemists spend a great deal of time and energy trying to get chemical reactions to begin or to speed up -- but sometimes it can be just as important to stop them before they go too far. In a recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, chemists have ...

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04-Jan-2019

A team of experimentalists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and theoreticians at University of Alabama Birmingham discovered a remarkably long-lived new state of matter in an iron pnictide superconductor, which reveals a laser-induced formation of collective behaviors that ...

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Berkeley Lab's SINGLE provides images of individual nanoparticles in solution

20-Jul-2015

Just as proteins are one of the basic building blocks of biology, nanoparticles can serve as the basic building blocks for next generation materials. In keeping with this parallel between biology and nanotechnology, a proven technique for determining the three dimensional structures of individual ...

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01-Jul-2015

A new technique pioneered at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory reveals atomic-scale changes during catalytic reactions in real time and under real operating conditions. A team of scientists used a newly developed reaction chamber to combine x-ray absorption ...

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03-Mar-2015

Scientists at the Critical Materials Institute have developed a two-step recovery process that makes recycling rare-earth metals easier and more cost-effective. Rare-earth metals are valuable ingredients in a variety of modern technologies and are found in cell phones, hard disk drives in ...

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Berkeley Lab researchers achieve highest resolution ever with X-ray microscopy

15-Sep-2014

A record-setting X-ray microscopy experiment may have ushered in a new era for nanoscale imaging. Working at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a collaboration of researchers used low energy or "soft" X-rays to image structures only five ...

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Berkeley Lab researchers use light to dope graphene boron nitride heterostructures

21-May-2014

Graphene continues to reign as the next potential superstar material for the electronics industry, a slimmer, stronger and much faster electron conductor than silicon. With no natural energy band-gap, however, graphene's superfast conductance can't be switched off, a serious drawback for ...

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07-Feb-2014

From matching wings on butterflies to the repeating six-point pattern of snowflakes, symmetries echo through nature, even down to the smallest building blocks of matter. Since the discovery of quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, physicists have been exploiting those symmetries to ...

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