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.
An advance in a topological insulator material — whose interior behaves like an electrical insulator but whose surface behaves like a conductor — could revolutionize the fields of next-generation electronics and quantum computing, according to scientists at ORNL.
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.
ORNL scientists combined two ligands, or metal-binding molecules, to target light and heavy lanthanides simultaneously for exceptionally efficient separation.
A series of new classes at Pellissippi State Community College will offer students a new career path — and a national laboratory a pipeline of workers who have the skills needed for its own rapidly growing programs.
Alice Perrin is passionate about scientific research, but also beans — as in legumes.
Warming a crystal of the mineral fresnoite, ORNL scientists discovered that excitations called phasons carried heat three times farther and faster than phonons, the excitations that usually carry heat through a material.
When Addis Fuhr was growing up in Bakersfield, California, he enjoyed visiting the mall to gaze at crystals and rocks in the gem store.
Researchers at ORNL zoomed in on molecules designed to recover critical materials via liquid-liquid extraction — a method used by industry to separate chemically similar elements.
Critical Materials Institute researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Arizona State University studied the mineral monazite, an important source of rare-earth elements, to enhance methods of recovering critical materials for energy, defense and manufacturing applications.