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Superhydrophobic water droplets
Samsung Electronics has exclusively licensed optically clear superhydrophobic film technology from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to improve the performance of glass displays on smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices. O...
Shull and Wollan
The Spallation Neutron Source marks a decade as a leading neutron science facility today at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “The Spallation Neutron Source has opened neutron scattering science to a new generation of researchers at a ti...
ORNL’s Michael Manley led a study to discover the key to the success of modern materials used in ultrasound machines and other piezoelectric devices.

The lighter wand for your gas BBQ, a submarine’s sonar device and the ultrasound machine at your doctor’s office all rely on piezoelectric materials, which turn mechanical stress into electrical energy, and vice versa. In 1997, researchers developed piezoelectric...

Neutrons facilities welcome 20,000th user
In August, the High Flux Isotope Reactor and the Spallation Neutron Source—both U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facilities at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory—reached a milestone with the arrival of Irina Nesmelova, the facilities’ 20,000th user. “We ...
To direct-write the logo of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists started with a gray-scale image.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are the first to harness a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) to directly write tiny patterns in metallic “ink,” forming features in liquid that are finer than half the width of a hum...
Paul Kent of Oak Ridge National Laboratory directs the Center for Predictive Simulation of Functional Materials.

The US Department of Energy announced today that it will invest $16 million over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through use of supercomputers. 

Theoretical condensed matter physicist Cristian Batista brings advanced knowledge of theory to expand upon the experimental physics research conducted at ORNL. (Image credit: Genevieve Martin)
Theory and experiment push each other to expand the frontiers of physics. Now, the Neutron Sciences Directorate at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has both. Cristian Batista, a theoretical condensed matter physicist with a joint appointment at ORNL and th...
A 32-face 3-D truncated icosahedron mesh was created to test the simulation’s ability to precisely construct complex geometries.
Designing a 3-D printed structure is hard enough when the product is inches or feet in size. Imagine shrinking it smaller than a drop of water, smaller even than a human hair, until it is dwarfed by a common bacterium. This impossibly small structure can be made a reality with fo...
ORNL’s Huiyuan Zhu places a sample of boron nitride, or “white graphene,” into a furnace as part of a novel, nontoxic gas exfoliation process to separate 2D nanomaterials.
A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a novel way to produce two-dimensional nanosheets by separating bulk materials with nontoxic liquid nitrogen. The environmentally friendly process generates a 20-fold ...
After running a simulation proving calcium-48 was a magic isotope, ORNL researchers were surprised to find experimental data and simulations that suggested calcium-52 was not magic, as expected.
​A multi-institution team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Gaute Hagen used computation to corroborate experimental findings throwing calcium-52’s status as a magic isotope into question.