Science Vignettes
Hydrogen a Culprit in Battery Degredation
UC Santa Barbara computational materials scientist Chris Van de Walle and colleagues, using NERSC, have uncovered a reason for the loss of capacity that occurs over time in sodium batteries: the unintended presence of hydrogen, which leads to degradation of the battery electrode. Read More »
An Integral Role for Gluons in the Proton's Pressure Distribution
For the first time, lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) calculations run at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) allowed nuclear physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to determine the pressure distribution inside a proton, including the individual contributions of the proton’s fundamental particles: quarks and gluons. This discovery brings nuclear scientists closer to a complete understanding of a proton’s structure and the fundamental particles that make up most of the visible matter in the universe. Read More »
New Insights Into the Human Gut Microbiome
Scientists at the DOE Joint Genome Institute computationally reconstructed 60,664 microbial genomes from 3,810 human gut metagenomes from geographically and phenotypically diverse human subjects. These genomes represent 2,058 previously unknown species, thereby bringing the number of known human gut species to 4,558 and increasing the phylogenetic diversity of sequenced gut bacteria by 50 percent. Read More »
A New Understanding of Perovskite Solar Cells
Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara used NERSC supercomputers to better understand the solar conversion efficiencies of hybrid perovskites and produce critical insights into how they work. Read More »
Squeezed nanocrystals: A new model predicts their shape
Scientific Achievement In a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and Northeastern University, scientists have developed a model for predicting the shape of metal nanocrystals or "islands" sandwiched between or below two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene. The advance moves 2D quantum materials a step closer to applications in electronics. Significance and Impact The structures and shapes of functional nanocrystals (NCs) are key to determining their… Read More »