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New Insight into Titan’s Hazy Atmospheric Chemistry

Researchers simulated the complex chemistry that may be occurring in the hazy atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and analyzed the reaction products at the ALS. The work provided new insights into what future Titan probes may encounter upon arrival and what the atmosphere of Earth may have been like eons ago. Read more »

Cheng Wang Wins RSC Stephanie L. Kwolek Award

Recently the Royal Society of Chemistry awarded its Materials Chemistry Division Horizon Prize: Stephanie L. Kwolek Award to a team of scientists, including ALS Staff Scientist Cheng Wang, for the discovery of chiral organic materials that allow high control of photon and electron spin. Read more »

Copper Doping Improves Sodium-Ion Battery Performance

A big plus for batteries based on sodium over lithium is that sodium is more earth-abundant, which lowers costs and eases environmental and supply-chain concerns. Research to improve the performance of sodium-ion batteries includes this effort to use copper doping of the cathode to enhance oxygen redox reversibility. Read more »

Antoine Wojdyla Receives Prestigious Five-Year Research Grant

Antoine Wojdyla is one of three scientists at Berkeley Lab selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science to receive funding through the Early Career Research Program (ECRP). His project is titled DREAM beam: Diffraction-limited Radiation Enhancement with Adaptive Mirrors for X-ray coherent beamlines. Read more »

Nanoscale Infrared Study of Meteorite Mineralogy

Using a nanoscale infrared probe, researchers found that the minerals in a meteorite—an artifact representing the solar system’s past—were altered by water on very fine spatial scales. The work sheds light on conditions in the early solar system and lays groundwork for analyzing asteroid samples to be returned to Earth by NASA in 2023. Read more »PPT-icon-35 PDF-icon-35

A Topological-Insulator Sandwich for Efficient Microelectronics

Researchers synthesized a topological insulator between two ferromagnetic layers and found that it is electronically characterized by a large magnetic band gap. The results open a new path toward lossless charge transport and perfect spin polarization, which could lead to the development of ultralow-energy electronics and spintronics. Read more »PPT-icon-35 PDF-icon-35

Decoupling the metal–insulator transition temperature and hysteresis of VO2 using Ge alloying and oxygen vacancies

The VO2 metal–insulator transition underpins applications in thermochromics, neuromorphic computing, and infrared vision. Ge alloying is shown to expand the stability of the monoclinic phase to higher temperatures, and by suppressing the propensity for oxygen vacancy formation, renders the hysteresis of the transition exquisitely sensitive to oxygen stoichiometry. Read more »

Removing Nitrogen from Wastewater using Horizontal Levees

Treated municipal wastewater often contains nitrogen, which has been linked to algal blooms that can devastate coastal ecosystems. In a recent study, researchers characterized the primary nitrogen-removal pathways in a horizontal levee, an engineered subsurface water-treatment system consisting of a gently sloping strip of land adjacent to storm-control levees. Read more »