Perfection is a problem when it comes to how computers model materials for energy applications. Although a typical model assumes materials are perfect, in reality they have flaws at their interfaces and boundaries. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, researchers simulate ion transport for ways to predict and improve materials for energy...

The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), managed by SRI International, in strategic partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), today announced a $2.3 million research program to advance cryogenic technologies that will enable innovation in quantum information science and technology (QIST). The program aims to...

Deliver a UK prototype fusion energy plant, targeting 2040, and thereafter a sustainable, long-term pathway to the commercial viability of nuclear fusion. That’s the ambitious objective – and even more ambitious timeline – confronting the scientists, engineers and project managers currently sweating the details for the conceptual design of the...

To look back in time at the cosmos’s infancy and witness the first stars flicker on, you must first grind a mirror as big as a house. Its surface must be so smooth that, if the mirror were the scale of a continent, it would feature no hill or valley...

Nestled 30 feet underground in Menlo Park, California, a half-mile-long stretch of tunnel is now colder than most of the universe. It houses a new superconducting particle accelerator, part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National...