Creating energy the way the sun and stars do — through nuclear fusion — is one of the grand challenges facing science and technology. What’s easy for the sun and its billions of relatives turns out to be particularly difficult on Earth.
ORNL will team up with six of eight companies that are advancing designs and research and development for fusion power plants with the mission to achieve a pilot-scale demonstration of fusion within a decade.
Led by Kelly Chipps of ORNL, scientists working in the lab have produced a signature nuclear reaction that occurs on the surface of a neutron star gobbling mass from a companion star. Their achievement improves understanding of stellar processes generating diverse nuclear isotopes.
Kelly Chipps, a nuclear astrophysicist at ORNL, has been appointed to the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, or NSAC. The committee provides official advice to DOE and the National Science Foundation, or NSF, about issues relating to the national program for basic nuclear science research.
Few things carry the same aura of mystery as dark matter. The name itself radiates secrecy, suggesting something hidden in the shadows of the Universe.
Andrea Delgado is looking for elementary particles that seem so abstract, there appears to be no obvious short-term benefit to her research.
The old photos show her casually writing data in a logbook with stacks of lead bricks nearby, or sealing a vacuum chamber with a wrench. ORNL researcher Frances Pleasonton was instrumental in some of the earliest explorations of the properties of the neutron as the X-10 Site was finding its postwar footing as a research lab.
A technology developed at ORNL and used by the U.S. Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, or NAVWAR, to test the capabilities of commercial security tools has been licensed to cybersecurity firm Penguin Mustache to create its Evasive.ai platform. The company was founded by the technology’s creator, former ORNL scientist Jared M. Smith, and his business partner, entrepreneur Brandon Bruce.
For nearly six years, the Majorana Demonstrator quietly listened to the universe. Nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, or SURF, in Lead, South Dakota, the experiment collected data that could answer one of the most perplexing questions in physics: Why is the universe filled with something instead of nothing?
U2opia Technology, a consortium of technology and administrative executives with extensive experience in both industry and defense, has exclusively licensed two technologies from ORNL that offer a new method for advanced cybersecurity monitoring in real time.