Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have used advanced microscopy to carve out nanoscale designs on the surface of a new class of ionic polymer materials for the first time. The study provides new evidence that atomic force microscopy, or AFM, could be used to precisely fabricate materials needed for increasingly smaller devices.

As part of the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, eight Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have been awarded nearly 800 million core hours on two of America’s fastest supercomputers dedicated to open science – Mira, an IBM Blue Gene/Q system located at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), and Titan, a Cray XK7 system located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Since the 1850s scientists have known that crystalline materials are organized into 14 different basic lattice structures. However, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) now reports that it has discovered an entirely new form of crystalline order that simultaneously exhibits both crystal and polycrystalline properties, which they describe as “interlaced crystals.”

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has signed a contract with IBM to bring a next-generation supercomputer to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The OLCF’s new hybrid CPU/GPU computing system, Summit, will be delivered in 2017.

New methods are improving connections between private businesses and technology from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with 101 licenses and options executed during the last three years.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are the first team to sequence the entire genome of the Clostridium autoethanogenum bacterium, which is used to sustainably produce fuel and chemicals from a range of raw materials, including gases derived from biomass and industrial wastes.

The High Flux Isotope Reactor, or HFIR, now in its 48th year of providing neutrons for research and isotope production at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been designated a Nuclear Historic Landmark by the American Nuclear Society (ANS).











