Science Highlights | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

Abstract representation of subcooled flow boiling modeled on experimental data collected for the Los Alamos National Laboratory Isotope Production Facility.

Deep Learning Model Overcomes the Challenge of Real-World Measurements of Isotope Production Target Cooling Systems

Researchers develop a framework to predict subcooled flow boiling and critical heat flux.

Cel7A cellulase enzymes (gold) are inhibited when breaking down cellulose (green) by the product, cellobiose, at both the “front door" (1) and “back door" (2) of the Cel7A tunnel, and by two other components of plant cell walls, lignin (brown) and xylan (orange).

Scientists Gain New Molecular-Level Insights into Breaking Down Plant Material for Biofuels

A specialized microscope allows investigations of single molecules of cellulase enzymes.

Quark recombination in the quark-gluon plasma formed in high-energy nuclei collisions enhances the production of Bc mesons. These mesons consist of a charm quark and a bottom quark. Most of the quark-gluon plasma decays into thousands of other particles.

Scientists Study How B_c Mesons Form to Gain More Information from Ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

Evidence for the formation of a quark-gluon plasma emerges from the recombination of freely moving charm and bottom quarks into B_c mesons.

Illustration of a proton-proton collision at the Large Hadron Collider. Quarks produced in these collisions can cluster in threes to produce baryons (green) or in twos to make mesons (red).

Research Offers New Insights into the Mechanisms of How Quarks Combine

Measurements from the LHCb collaboration expand scientific understanding of how individual quarks assemble to form observable matter.

Physicists modeled gold-gold collisions at different energies to probe fluid properties over a range of temperatures and baryon densities. The dashed line represents the region where ordinary nuclear matter is expected to transition to free quarks and gluons.

How Sticky Is Dense Nuclear Matter?

Scientists use a large-scale statistical analysis to extract the viscosity of hot, dense nuclear matter created at different heavy ion collision energies.

Hubble Space Telescope image of the globular cluster NGC 2419, a collection of stars orbiting the Milky Way about 300,000 light years away from Earth.

New Experimental Results Set the Stage for Understanding the Mysterious History of NGC 2419

High resolution study of calcium-40 Ca to constrain potassium nucleosynthesis in the NGC 2419 globular cluster.

Student working in the Texas A&M University lab processing astatine-211.

New Understanding of Astatine’s Chemical Properties Will Aid Targeted Alpha Therapy for Cancer

Researchers gain new insights into how the isotope astatine-211 interacts with resins commonly used to purify the isotope for therapeutic use.

Illustration of the structure of the radium compound characterized in this research. Single crystal X-ray diffraction provided detailed information on the bonding of radium in an organic molecule for the first time.

A First Look Inside Radium’s Solid-State Chemistry

Researchers used single crystal X-ray diffraction to learn about the structure and bonding of a highly radioactive radium compound.

Left: A beam of electrons generates vibrational waves in a crystal lattice that are then reflected by quantum dots. Right: Generated vibrations are more easily reflected by abrupt, sharp interfaces of materials than by diffuse ones.

Unveiling How Heat Moves in Materials with Atomic-Scale Resolution

Scientists develop a nanoscale electron imaging method that reveals the dynamics of the collective vibrations of atoms at the interface between materials.