Skip to main content

ALS

Home / News / Science Briefs

Science Briefs

Characterization of EUV Optics using Intrinsic Mask Roughness

Researchers developed an in situ computational technique for measuring aberrations in EUV optics, taking advantage of the surface roughness of photomasks used to transfer circuit patterns onto chips. The technique will prove increasingly valuable in the characterization of coherent light sources and beamline optical systems. Read more »

Missing Lysine Link Could Improve Plant-Based Nutrition

To engineer crops with higher levels of the important amino acid, lysine, researchers solved the structure of an enzyme that helps break down lysine in plants. A fuller understanding of the factors affecting lysine levels should aid in the successful development of stable high-lysine crops to combat malnutrition globally. Read more »

Small but Still Mighty: Ultrafine Grains Produce Ultrastrong Metals

Researchers used in situ high-pressure diffraction to resolve a debate about whether a metal’s strength increases or decreases when its grain size decreases below a critical point. The results indicate that ultrastrong metals for future applications can indeed be achieved through grain-size refinement and grain-boundary engineering. Read more »

Rotavirus VP3 Is a Multifunctional Capping Machine

Rotavirus, a major cause of infantile gastroenteritis, is responsible for the deaths of about 200,000 children per year. Although vaccines are available, the virus still circulates, and a fuller understanding of the viral structures is needed. Here, scientists investigate the structure and function of the last unsolved rotavirus structural protein. Read more »

Artificial Antiferromagnets Facilitate Studies of Domain-Wall Motion

Researchers fabricated artificial spin lattices that undergo a paramagnetic-to-antiferromagnetic phase transition. These artificial antiferromagnets enable studies of dynamical properties that are critical to understanding, and ultimately implementing, real-world applications such as advanced computing and data-storage technologies. Read more »

COSMIC Probes Evolution of Single-Atom Platinum Catalyst

Researchers synthesized a single-atom platinum catalyst that outperformed, by a factor of 15, conventional platinum-based catalysts, which are used for fuel cells and automotive emissions control. Operando x-ray spectromicroscopy at the ALS’s COSMIC beamline revealed how electronic interactions affect the material’s morphology. Read more »

Long Chains Stabilize Higher-Efficiency Solar Cells

Perovskite thin films have many attractive properties for use in photovoltaics, but their assembly into practical devices has led to trade-offs between efficiency and stability. The addition of surfactant-type molecules with hydrophobic chains helped produce perovskite solar cells that are both efficient and stable. Read more »

How a Cancer Drug Targets Proteins for Degradation

Protein structures obtained by Novartis researchers helped reveal how a cancer drug promotes the degradation of proteins essential to cell proliferation. A detailed understanding of the drug’s mechanism of action is key to determining whether the protein-degradation system can be reprogrammed to degrade different targets. Read more »PPT-icon-35

A Forked Path for Superconductivity

Uranium ditelluride (UTe2) exhibits a form of superconductivity that could, in theory, enable fault-tolerant quantum computing. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy revealed several aspects of the material’s unusual electronic environment, including one-dimensional conducting channels that are orthogonally oriented. Read more »

Porous Electrolyte Frameworks for All-Solid-State Batteries

With the help of microtomography at the ALS, researchers developed a method to produce a porous electrolyte framework that they used to construct a working all-solid-state battery. Such batteries potentially offer a higher energy density, longer cycle life, and better inherent safety than state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries. Read more »