Award Data

Technologies for terrestrial ecosystem management – in the area of precision agriculture and ecosystem restoration – have made significant advances recently for more sustainable practices by optimizing water, nutrients, and fertilizers Many of these technologies include monitoring and imaging of plants, soil, and crop harvest as well as their interactions, using in situ sensors, remote sensing ...

Wind and solar electricity are gaining traction in the marketplace, but the electricity available from these sources is out of synch with demand Protonic ceramic electrochemical cells (PCECs) operating at intermediate temperatures (400 - 650°C) have enormous potential for electricity storage and delivery by reversible operation between electrolysis and fuel cell modes and therefore stand to addre ...

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 comm ...

Many energy conversion and transfer processes critically depend on the material nanostructure details and its response to external excitation fields Surface and volume defect formation and migration have a profound impact on the opto-electro-thermo-mechanical properties of materials Understanding these processes requires a unique combination of advanced atomic-scale imaging with controlled nanosca ...

Quantum information sciences started as a concept many years ago, transitioned to a subject of theoretical analysis, followed by experimental efforts mainly focused on controlling individual qubits Rather dramatically, the last couple of years have witnessed a significant milestone with the creation of nascent functioning quantum computers operating with tens of qubits Present quantum computers, r ...

Large size diffraction-grade diamond is needed for high scientific impact applications at synchrotron and Free-Electron Laser (FEL) X-ray sources, stemming from diamond’s unique physical properties in low atomic number and extremely high thermal diffusivity Sufficiently large diffraction-grade diamond crystals, similar in crystalline quality to that of silicon, are required for the fabrication o ...

The spatiotemporal quantification of coupled hydro-biogeochemical processes between soil, plant, and atmosphere requires advances in remote sensing technologies and in understanding the link between the measured signals (ie spectral traits) and the hydro-biochemical properties While current UAV-based remote sensing technologies provide spectral reflectance in the visible- short wave infrared (VSWI ...

The quantification of in situ fine root phenotypes is an important task in the comprehensive study of natural and agricultural environments and critical to under- standing how plants respond to various changes in those environments, especially as those changes relate to energy and environmental challenges Mini-rhizotron experiments enable nondestructive imaging of in situ root systems, but their a ...

Solar fuels production is necessary for the future of the global economy New highly conductive and stable polymer-electrolytes with low light absorption are required for efficient and cost- effective solar fuels generation Opus 12 will work with Prof Chulsung Bae at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to further develop the existing polymer-electrolyte chemistry to meet the demands of this chal ...

In spite of the promise of terahertz frequency range, the maturity of terahertz technologies, such as sources or detectors, remains relatively weak In particular, ultrafast optoelectronic switches are a key component to both sources and detectors, but current versions of them require too much power to be commercially viable, particularly for applications involving detector arrays The overall objec ...