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.
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?
A scientific instrument at ORNL could help create a noninvasive cancer treatment derived from a common tropical plant.
The U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense teamed up to create a series of weld filler materials that could dramatically improve high-strength steel repair in vehicles, bridges and pipelines.
Two decades in the making, a new flagship facility for nuclear physics opened on May 2, and scientists from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have a hand in 10 of its first 34 experiments.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory expertise in fission and fusion has come together to form a new collaboration, the Fusion Energy Reactor Models Integrator, or FERMI
Marcel Demarteau is director of the Physics Division at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For topics from nuclear structure to astrophysics, he shapes ORNL’s physics research agenda.
About 60 years ago, scientists discovered that a certain rare earth metal-hydrogen mixture, yttrium, could be the ideal moderator to go inside small, gas-cooled nuclear reactors.
From materials science and earth system modeling to quantum information science and cybersecurity, experts in many fields run simulations and conduct experiments to collect the abundance of data necessary for scientific progress.
In the search to create materials that can withstand extreme radiation, Yanwen Zhang, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, says that materials scientists must think outside the box.