ORNL is proud of its role in fostering the next generation of scientists and engineers. We bring in talented young researchers, team them with accomplished scientists and engineers, and put them to work at the lab’s one-of-a-kind facilities. The result is research that makes us proud and prepares th...

ORNL is proud of its role in fostering the next generation of scientists and engineers. We bring in talented young researchers, team them with accomplished scientists and engineers, and put them to work at the lab’s one-of-a-kind facilities. The result is research that makes us proud and prepares th...

In 1944 ORNL physicist Ernest Wollan proposed a novel method for using neutrons to study the atomic structure of materials. At the Graphite Reactor—then known as the X-10 Pile—Wollan worked with future Nobelist Clifford Shull to pioneer neutron-scattering research and unlock the potential of neutron...

Researchers sometimes need access to expertise and facilities not available at their universities, companies and institutes. To manipulate materials on the scale of nanometers—billionths of a meter—they come to the world-class experts, specialty instruments and state-of-the-art techniques at ORNL’s ...

For some researchers, cracking the big questions can be like mining for a lone diamond under tons of solid rock.

In those situations it helps to have a good set of tools, particularly the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and its Titan supercomputer.

Titan isn’t the facility’s first worl...

The Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered more than a century ago that elemental mercury can transmit electricity without energy loss, making it the first known superconductor.

The catch was that it had to be very cold—near absolute zero— and while scientists have since discovered or ...

There's a problem with our understanding of the universe: We don't know why it has enough matter to make it interesting.

The Standard Model of particle physics encompasses three of nature's four fundamental forces—all but gravity—yet it tells us the Big Bang should have produced matter and antima...