Sometimes understanding how a problem arises in the first place is key to finding its solution. For a team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, taking this approach led them to the cause of degraded performance in an operating sodium-ion battery. “We discovered that the loss in battery capacity…

The remarkable properties that diamonds possess result from their crystalline structure; similar structures in which nanoparticles substitute for carbon atoms could lead to materials with new and undiscovered properties. For the first time, scientists realized ordered arrays (superlattices) of nanoparticles, which self-organize in the same way that carbon atoms do within a diamond lattice (Science,…

Reports of the non-existence of the so-called “sterile” neutrino are premature, say scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory — even as they release results from two experiments that further limit the places this elusive particle may be hiding. These results, described in three papers published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) by…

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have created a new imaging technique that allows scientists to probe the internal makeup of a battery during charging and discharging using different x-ray energies while rotating the battery cell. The technique produces a three-dimensional chemical map and lets the scientists track chemical reactions in…

Some three-dimensional materials can exhibit exotic properties that only exist in “lower” dimensions. For example, in one-dimensional chains of atoms that emerge within a bulk sample, electrons can separate into three distinct entities, each carrying information about just one aspect of the electron’s identity — spin, charge, or orbit. The spinon, the entity that carries…