Neutron scattering scientist Clarina dela Cruz uses the powerful tools at SNS and HFIR to investigate quantum materials, whose exotic physical properties arise from the quantum mechanical properties of their electrons.
Dela Cruz’s research lies at the nexus of topology, quantum field theory and q...
When ORNL climate researcher Melissa Allen was a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in 2011, her advisor, Joshua Fu, told her about the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, a new partnership between the university and ORNL offering a unique way to earn ...
In 1959, then-Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, became surely the most glamorous couple ever to stand on the viewing platform of the Oak Ridge Research Reactor.
The Kennedys are just two of the host of dignitaries from around the world who have made ORNL a destination because of i...
ORNL’s nuclear pioneers understood early on that this new technology would demand the hardiest of materials.
Nuclear reactors—with high temperatures and pressures, corrosive and oxidizing liquids, and heavy neutron bombardment—are a uniquely hostile environment for the materials that go into thei...
In the early 1970s, scientists at laboratories worldwide raced to unravel the mystery of how billions of miles of DNA are packaged inside the cells of the human body.
ORNL’s Don and Ada Olins were the first to discover the critical structure—the nucleosome—that winds DNA around proteins like thre...
What do you do when you can’t test your technology?
The United States faced that question when it halted nuclear weapons testing in 1992. The answer came in the form of virtual tests using high-performance computers.
Although “stockpile stewardship,” as it was known, drove the rapid developmen...
Conspiracy theories are nothing new. When President Zachary Taylor took sick and died 16 months into his presidency in 1850, he had been a relatively healthy war hero. A fatal gastric malady struck after he consumed fruit and iced milk at a July 4th celebration.
Slavery was the issue of the day, ...