Award Data

One of grand challenges in nanoscience and nanotechnology is to achieve fundamental under- standing of the dynamic evolution of materials in actual operating environment, non-equilibrium conditions, or undergoing chemical reactions at the nanoscale. This requires forefront advances in imaging and analysis techniques that combine nanometer-scale spatial resolution, optical excitation and spectrosco ...

The Neutron Spin Echo (NSE) method has provided unique information about the dynamics of soft materials, including confirmation of the de Gennes model of polymer reptation, and quantitative measurement of the bending constants of various membranes. In almost all cases these measurements have been made at small neutron scattering angles, where structural correlations with length scales between 10 n ...

Although thermal and cold neutron scattering is widely used, and is critical for success in many areas of materials science and engineering, relatively low neutron fluxes severely limit applications of not only laboratory neutrons generators, but also large national neutron facilities. State-of-the-art thermal and cold neutron sources are large expensive national facilities, which serve diverse co ...

Wastewater from oil and gas production has high total dissolved solids (TDS) and organics and needs to be treated for safe disposal or reuse. Coal-fired power plant discharges and mining effluents share similar high TDS and organic contents. This project targets the development of an energy efficient, and robust supercritical desalination technology to treat hypersaline solutions, destroying organ ...

Quantifying atmospheric aerosol, clouds and precipitation processes are critical needs for understanding and interpreting Earth’s changing energy budget, is a DOE objective, and is of broader benefit to the public. Specifically, the formation of ice in the atmosphere depends on the nature and abundance of ice nucleating particles, and has major implications for precipitation and cloud interactio ...

Currently the chemical composition of atmospheric particulate matter is measured either by off-line analyses of time-integrated filter samples, or by in-situ instruments requiring near-constant operator oversight. These measurement approaches result in sparse or limited data coverage. Despite the critical role of composition on the health and environmental impacts of particulate matter, there exis ...

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 ...

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 ...

Modern quantum information systems employ optical photons for long distance communication, operating at ambient temperature, between microwave cavities, which house microwave photons used in quantum computing and microwave detection. These optical photons, carried by fiber-optic or free-space links, offer a low-cost, uncooled alternative to bulky, expensive microwave coaxial cables, which are loss ...

Renewable algae fuels are the source of energy for the future. It was demonstrated that algae fuels can be produced and they were successfully used in demonstration airplane flights and cars. The cost of algae oil is still high and cannot compete with fossil fuels. High algae growth and ability to accumulate oil fast are the key factors that will make algae based biofuels affordable. Diatoms are t ...