Award Data

Recently, the Generation IV International Forum has established a set of nuclear reactors (advanced nuclear reactors), with main objectives to improve overall reactor safety, efficiency, sustainability, and proliferation resistance for economically viable nuclear energy. These advanced reactor technologies rely on novel fuels and materials that are resistant to radiation damage and corrosive envir ...

The power output of the high power lasers used in physics research is limited by the materials available for making the gain media in the laser. Future increases in power will require new and better materials. Operation at high power creates great thermal stresses that can lead to effects such as birefringence, thermal lensing or even physical fracture damage to the host itself. Effective cooling ...

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 ...

For economically viable large-scale production of microalgae based food and biofuel to become a reality, significant improvements in algal productivity need to be achieved. With current regulatory guidelines, large scale outdoor cultivation of microalgae for these products restricts the use of transgenic algal strains, which in the laboratory, have thus far been the primary strategy taken to effec ...

To advance a strong and economical biofuels and bioproducts industry, tools are needed for breeding microalgae to improve phenotypes of commercial interest, including biomass yield, culture stability, harvestability, and accumulation of valuable compounds. This project aims to increase biomass feedstock yields by the phototrophic green alga Scenedesmus obliquus by using classical breeding approach ...

The discovery of large shale gas reserves in recent years has resulted in the reduction of natural gas price and a need to develop new applications for the available resource. Upgrading shale gas to liquid fuels which are more easily transportable and have greater economic value can result in significant benefits to the US. Coupled with this challenging problem the DOE has a goal of further develo ...

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 ...

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 ...

In recent decades, High Performance Computing (HPC) has risen as one of the key enablers of innovation in science and engineering. However, complexity and cost of deploying applications impedes industrial adoption. Problems include the quality, speed, and flexibility of software tools and the specialized expertise required to adapt solutions given the profusion of hardware configurations. Efficien ...