Award Data

SixPoint Materials will create low-cost, high-quality vertical gallium nitride (GaN) substrates using a multi-phase production approach that employs both hydride vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE) technology and ammonothermal growth techniques to lower costs and maintain crystal quality. Substrates are thin wafers of semiconducting material needed for power devices. In its two-phase project, SixPoint Mate ...

National security interests related to the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction require the remote detection of trace gases associated with the nuclear fuel cycle. Newly developed, mid-infrared, quantum cascade lasers have the potential to contribute to this application. These small solid state lasers produce relatively high power in the infrared band of light where many gases can be ...

A growing number of electronic devices are being implanted in patients to treat a wide range of maladies. While these devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, they are powered by conventional chemical batteries with limited operating life and power output. These conventional batteries are essentially self-contained electrochemical reactors, and the total power they can produc ...

Opportunities exists to develop high-efficiency thermoelectric (TE) devices for the cost-effective exploitation of industrial waste heat (e.g., in manufacturing process) and for industrial process refrigeration. The key to the development of such high-efficiency TE devices is to develop a TE material with a high ZT value. High-efficiency ZT devices can recycle waste heat, increase energy efficie ...

Short-lived isotopes are expected to play a key role in unravelling unanswered questions in nuclear physics research. The modified Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA)-lite facility, under consideration for construction in the US, will have unique capabilities for the development of exotic beams to facilitate these studies. The DOE RIA-lite program is seeking advances in production techniques and impr ...

Recent reports indicate the activity of more than 6,000 botnet C and C servers. 70 million zombies are responsible for 80 percent of SPAM. Given the exponential growth of the botnet threat, the security of our nation s cyber infrastructure demand automated botnet activity monitoring solutions. In Phase I, Milcord developed a feasibility prototype of a Bayesian Activity Monitor for Botnet Defense. ...

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 ...

Neutron-sensitive microchannel Plates (MCPs) are now providing state-of-the-art user-based, high spatial resolution neutron imaging systems at several US government neutron research facilities as well as university research reactors. Using enriched 10B, thermalized neutron detection efficiencies exceeding 50% have been demonstrated, and cold neutron detection efficiencies of up to 70% have been do ...

Statistical machine learning has had substantial impacts on many business areas, including finance, supply chain management, cyber security, bioengineering, and elsewhere – it is the core of companies including Google, FaceBook, TrueCar, and many others. However, extant tools for predictive analytics provide little or no insight into underlying processes. Hence, while machine learning has inargu ...

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 ...