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Patricia Blair

We ask some of our young researchers why they chose a career in science, what they are working on at ORNL, and where they would like to go with their careers.

Michael Berry

On April 5, 2018, physicist Michael Berry delivered the Eugene P. Wigner Distinguished Lecture on the topic “Making Light of Mathematics.” His talk reflected on Wigner’s 1960 paper, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” This is an edited transcript of our conversation following his lecture.

Leaving home

While V-J Day in August 1945 heralded the end of World War II for most of the country, it brought uncertainty to many of the men and women of the Manhattan Project.

ITER

The doughnut-shaped ITER will, for the first time on Earth, create a burning (self-heating) plasma and contain it with a magnetic field. The plasma itself will be heated and sustained primarily by its own fusion reactions—literally the same energy source that powers the sun and the stars. 

Huibo Cao

The next great materials discovery may well come from the exotic interactions of electrons at a scale a million times smaller than a human hair. This is the scale of quantum physics, and it’s where ORNL’s Huibo Cao focuses his effort.

Arctic 2

For the past six years, some 140 scientists from five institutions have traveled to the Arctic Circle and beyond to gather field data as part of the DOE-sponsored Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments Arctic or NGEE Arctic project. We talk with the project's director, ORNL's Stan Wullschleger, about the discoveries and challenges of the NGEE Arctic project.

Insulation panels

ORNL’s Building Envelope & Urban Systems Research Group may have found the answer to self-healing buildings by creating a novel multilayered barrier film with self-healing properties for vacuum insulation panels.