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The problem/situation that is being addressed concerns the development of ultrafast coatings that will meet the specifications of the DoE solicitation: “broad-bandwidth, laser damage threshold of 0.5 J/cm2 (1 ps), engineered using a process that is scalable to large areas.” Development of interference coatings (ICs) with superior laser damage is strongly motivated by the needs to scale near in ...

Ultra-high power, ultrashort pulse lasers systems are the central tool driving many of the recent advances in high energy density plasma science. They enable the generation of high energy density relativistic plasmas, bright x-ray and gamma–ray bursts, energetics particle beams and neutrons, and drive applications such as shadowgraphy of inertial confinement fusion targets and fast ignition. How ...

Plastics are indispensable materials for modern life and the global economy, but current practices in the generation, use, and disposal of commodity plastics are largely unsustainable, causing severe worldwide plastics pollution and enormous energy and materials value loss in the economy. In particular, plastics are a material of choice in packaging applications, but they are currently designed fo ...

By 2050 43,400,000 metric tons of cumulative wind turbine blade waste is expected to exist and continue growing at 2,000,000 metric tons/year globally. Even in the near term, wind turbine blade waste generation is expected to approach 1,000,000 metric tons/year by 2029. In short, the amount of wind turbine blade waste needing disposal is growing rapidly while the status quo option of landfilling, ...

As computational density for high- performance computing and big-data services continues to scale, performance scalability of next generation computing systems is becoming increasingly constrained by limitations in memory access, power dissipation and chip packaging. The processor-memory communication bottleneck, a major challenge in current multicore processors due to limited pin-out and power bu ...

In resource limited settings, rapid and accurate diagnosis of infections is critical for managing potential exposures to highly virulent pathogens, whether occurring from an act of bioterrorism or a natural event. This is especially important for hard to detect intracellular bacterial and alphavirus infections, that overlap symptomatically and often treated empirically due to a lack of reliable an ...

Direct Internal Reforming Solid Oxide Fuel Cells require an anode material with good catalytic reforming and electrochemical reactivity. Although the current state-of-the-art solid oxide fuel cell anode consisting of nickel and yttrium-stabilized zirconia (Ni-YSZ) has excellent catalytic properties and stability for the H2 oxidation at the usual operation conditions, the use of Ni-YSZ anode with c ...

"The next generation of very high field accelerator magnets (20 T or more) are expected to be made with high-temperature superconductors (HTS) along with conventional low-temperature superconductors (LTS) to reduce cost. The operation and protection of these magnets becomes very challenging particularly if the HTS coils are made with the tapes and operate at a much lower current than the LTS coils ...

To increase the utilization of electric vehicles, the US Department of Energy is seeking to reduce the cost of electric vehicle batteries to less than $125/kWh by 2022. To achieve this goal, the costs of cathode materials, which account for approximately 30% of the cost of vehicle batteries, must be reduced significantly. To address the challenge of lowering the costs of advanced lithium battery c ...

Augmented reality (AR) offers the ability to enhance existing combat medic training by including perceptual cues and adaptive training elements to traditional simulation-based training using manikins. Unveil has developed a training system called the Macrocognitive AR Trainer (MART). MART is designed to foster the development of macrocognitive skills (e.g., sensemaking, assessment skills, mental m ...