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A recent report by the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee entitled “Challenges at the Frontiers of Matter and Energy” pointed to the need to better understand hierarchical and heterogeneous materials, often at the mesoscopic scale. Such structures can be studied by x-ray and neutron scattering techniques, but they do not generally yield narrow signals in momentum or energy space. The nat ...

Infrared spectroscopy is the most widely used technique for chemical characterization with a worldwide market of over $1B annually. Conventional infrared spectroscopy suffers, however, from fundamental spatial resolution limits that prohibit its application at the nanoscale. This has prevented widespread use of IR spectroscopy in the growing field of nanoscale materials. The atomic force microsc ...

The DOEs & quot;Monitoring Verification and Accounting (MVA) program goal is to confirm permanent storage of CO2 in geologic formations by real-time monitoring should CO2 leak. Remote technologies, effective for atmospheric or above ground CO2 monitoring, are ineffective for subsurface, and it is where leakage can be detected first. By the time leaked CO2 slowly appears on the surface, CO2 may hav ...

"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 ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program aims at development and demonstration of an integrated theoretically/experimentally combinatorial method for the accurate prediction of rheological behaviors of special polymer solutions. In-depth understandings of dynamic responses of the polymer solutions under external shear are essential for development of the “smart” polymer-based add ...

Many important technology challenges today such as the capacity and life time of batteries require new characterization techniques to understand and improve performance. In the STTR Phase II project, novel x-ray microscope techniques and software are developed to be able to image samples in three dimensions and determine chemical composition and function on a microscopic level. As known from ubi ...

The feasibility for fusion as a practical energy source needs to be enhanced significantly by removing some of the restrictions that low-temperature superconductors put on the fusion magnet systems. This can be done by using high-temperature superconductors, allowing for much larger temperature margins, a higher magnet performance and less mechanical degradation during operation. There are curren ...

Near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) is a powerful and unique approach to characterize the chemical, physical and potentially biochemical properties of materials with the nanometer scale resolution in real-time. A key element for NSOM systems that combine optical spectroscopy with scanning probe microscopy, is the actual probe itself. While many commercial vendors offer off-the-shelf meta ...

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is one of the primary tools for biological and materials characterization; however, there is an overarching need to push TEM temporal resolution into a ps-range to study physical processes on their fundamental spatial and temporal scales. With state-of-the-art TEM, however, it is not possible to capture a single image with a temporal resolution better than 10 ...