Dedicated to spreading the Good News of Basic and Applied Science at great research institutions world wide. Good science is a collaborative process. The rule here: Science Never Sleeps.
I am telling the reader this story in the hope of impelling him or her to find their own story and start a wordpress blog. We all have a story. Find yours.
The oldest post I can find for this blog is From FermiLab Today: Tevatron is Done at the End of 2011 (but I am not sure if that is the first post, just the oldest I could find.)
But the origin goes back to 1985, Timothy Ferris Creation of the Universe PBS, November 20, 1985, available in different videos on YouTube; The Atom Smashers, PBS Frontline November 25, 2008, centered at Fermilab, not available on YouTube; and The Big Bang Machine, with Sir Brian Cox of U Manchester and the ATLAS project at the LHC at CERN.
In 1993, our idiot Congress pulled the plug on The Superconducting Super Collider, a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas. Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometers (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 Tev per proton and was set to be the world’s largest and most energetic. It would have greatly surpassed the current record held by the Large Hadron Collider, which has ring circumference 27 km (17 mi) and energy of 13 TeV per proton.
If this project had been built, most probably the Higgs Boson would have been found there, not in Europe, to which the USA had ceded High Energy Physics.
(We have not really left High Energy Physics. Most of the magnets used in The LHC are built in three U.S. DOE labs: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Also, see below. the LHC based U.S. scientists at Fermilab and Brookhaven Lab.)
I have recently been told that the loss of support in Congress was caused by California pulling out followed by several other states because California wanted the collider built there.
The project’s director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Louis Ianniello served as its first Project Director for 15 months. The project was cancelled in 1993 due to budget problems, cited as having no immediate economic value.
Some where I learned that fully 30% of the scientists working at CERN were U.S. citizens. The ATLAS project had 600 people at Brookhaven Lab. The CMS project had 1,000 people at Fermilab. There were many scientists which had “gigs” at both sites.
I started digging around in CERN web sites and found Quantum Diaries, a “blog” from before there were blogs, where different scientists could post articles. I commented on a few and my dismay about the lack of U.S recognition in the press.
Those guys at Quantum Diaries, gave me access to the Greybook, the list of every institution in the world in several tiers processing data for CERN. I collected all of their social media and was off to the races for CERN and other great basic and applied science.
Since then I have expanded the list of sites that I cover from all over the world. I build .html templates for each institution I cover and plop their articles, complete with all attributions and graphics into the template and post it to the blog. I am not a scientist and I am not qualified to write anything or answer scientific questions. The only thing I might add is graphics where the origin graphics are weak. I have a monster graphics library. Any science questions are referred back to the writer who is told to seek his answer from the real scientists in the project.
The blog has to date 900 followers on the blog, its Facebook Fan page and Twitter. I get my material from email lists and RSS feeds. I do not use Facebook or Twitter, which are both loaded with garbage in the physical sciences.
richardmitnick
10:28 am on March 21, 2023 Permalink
| Reply Tags: "Cosmic coding", Argonne and Berkeley laboratories teams have developed a pair of the world’s most powerful cosmological simulation codes and are ready to translate observational data into new insights., Astronomy ( 10,796 ), Astrophysics ( 8,669 ), Basic Research ( 16,197 ), Both codes are key components of the DOE Exascale Computing Project’s (ECP) ExaSky program., Computational Cosmology, Cosmology ( 8,786 ), Dark matter particles’ exact nature is yet a mystery as is the cosmic conundrum linked to dark energy., HACC and Nyx were born about 15 years ago with the common goal of creating state-of-the-art highly scalable codes that run on any supercomputing platform., Starting in early 2025 Rubin in northern Chile will record the entire visible southern sky every few days for a decade., Supercomputing ( 396 ), The codes and telescopes focus on understanding how dark matter and dark energy shape cosmic structure and dynamics., The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will map cosmic structure in unprecedented detail., The DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory ( 16 ), The DOE’s ASCR Discovery ( 8 ), The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, The HACC team collaborates closely with the Rubin Observatory., The Nyx team is working most closely with DESI., The Nyx {LBNL] and HACC [ANL] codes, The simulations produce synthetic skies-virtual versions of what a telescope will see-that let astronomers plan and test observing strategies., The standard explanation for the cosmic web is the λCDM (lambda cold dark matter) model.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Argonne National Laboratory computational cosmologists help astronomers turn observation into insight.
An artist’s composite of images from Nyx-generated cosmic web simulations, showing dense filaments of matter surrounded by vast voids representing a span of hundreds of millions of light years. The image graces the cabinets of the Perlmutter supercomputer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) . Image courtesy of NERSC/Berkeley Lab.
Two new Department of Energy-sponsored telescopes, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, will map cosmic structure in unprecedented detail.
At the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, teams have developed a pair of the world’s most powerful cosmological simulation codes and are ready to translate the telescopes’ tsunami of observational data into new insights.
“Our job is to provide the theoretical backdrop to these observations,” says Zarija Lukić, a computational cosmologist at LBNL’s Cosmology Computing Center. “You cannot infer much from observations alone about the structure of the universe without also having a set of powerful simulations producing predictions for different physical parameters.”
Lukić is a lead developer of Nyx, named after the Greek goddess of night. For more than a decade the Nyx group has collaborated with the hardware/hybrid accelerated cosmology code, or HACC, team at Argonne, co-led by computational cosmologist Katrin Heitmann, who is also the principal investigator for an Office of Science SciDAC-5 project in High Energy Physics (HEP) that will continue to advance code development. (See sidebar, About SciDAC.)
With a computing time grant from the ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC), the Nyx and HACC teams are fine-tuning their codes, readying them to tease out cosmic details from incoming DESI and Rubin Observatory data.
The codes and telescopes focus on understanding how dark matter and dark energy shape cosmic structure and dynamics. Matter in the universe is unevenly distributed. Astronomers see a cosmic web, a vast tendril-like network of dense regions of gas and galaxies interspersed with low-density voids.
The standard explanation for the cosmic web is the Lambda-CDM (cold dark matter) model.
It posits that the cosmos’ total mass and energy is composed of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and only about 5% visible, or baryonic, matter – the stars, planets and us.
Dark matter particles’ exact nature is yet a mystery as is another cosmic conundrum linked to dark energy: “What causes the accelerated expansion of the universe?” asks Heitmann, leader of Argonne’s Cosmological Physics and Advanced Computing group.
Heitmann’s HACC team collaborates closely with the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) observing campaign. Starting in early 2025 Rubin in northern Chile will record the entire visible southern sky every few days for a decade, tracking the movement of billions of galaxies in the low-redshift, or nearby, universe. This will produce unprecedented amounts of data: six million gigabytes per year.
The incoming deluge doesn’t deter Heitmann. The HACC team won an award at the SC19 high-performance computing conference for a record-breaking transfer of almost three petabytes of data to generate virtual universes on the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer.
The simulations produce synthetic skies-virtual versions of what a telescope will see-that let astronomers plan and test observing strategies.
“Our simulations are geared toward supporting the large observational surveys that are coming online,” says Heitmann, who’s also a spokesperson for LSST’s Dark Energy Science Collaboration. “They are large cosmic volume with very high resolution and there are only a handful of such stimulations currently available in the world.”
In 2019, the HACC team used the largest ALCC allocation ever – the entire Argonne Mira supercomputer for several months – to produce a synthetic sky for both the DESI and Vera Rubin teams to use when testing their observation strategies.
The Nyx team is working most closely with DESI, which began collecting data in 2022. Located at the Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona, DESI’s four-year spectroscopic observing campaign will map the cosmos’ large-scale structure across time using its 5,000-eye fiber-optic robotic telescope.
It will observe about 30 million pre-selected galaxies and quasars across a third of the night sky.
As part of this, DESI will observe about 840,000 distant, or high redshift, quasars, three times as many as previous surveys collected. Quasars are astoundingly bright objects – thousands of times as bright as an entire galaxy. As their light travels between the quasar and Earth, some wavelengths are absorbed by neutral hydrogen gas present in the intergalactic medium between distant galaxies. Thus, the quasar’s distinctive light fingerprint, known as the Lyman-alpha forest, maps intergalactic hydrogen distribution.
Statistically analyzing and modeling hundreds of thousands of DESI Lyman-alpha forest spectra will provide unprecedented constraints on the mass and properties of candidate dark matter particles, says Lukić, whose LBNL post-doctoral colleague, Solène Chabanier, leads the working group focused on this problem.
Nyx has a strong track record of modeling these spectra to better understand cosmic structure. For example, for a 2017 Science paper, the group used Nyx simulations and Lyman-alpha forest observations to identify gas distribution smoothness in the intergalactic medium.
HACC and Nyx were born about 15 years ago with the common goal of creating state-of-the-art, highly scalable codes that run on any supercomputing platform, capitalizing on new generations of DOE supercomputers. Both codes are key components of the DOE Exascale Computing Project’s (ECP) ExaSky program, which is scheduled to conclude at the end of this year. HEP and ASCR, as part of SciDAC-5, will to develop the codes.
What makes Nyx and HACC a great tag team is that they use very different mathematical approaches to hydrodynamics, Lukić says – how the codes model elements such as pressure, temperature and baryonic matter movement.
Nyx uses adaptive mesh refinement, dividing space into a grid describing hydrodynamical properties – the fluidic forces – of baryons. The HACC code was originally developed for gravity-only simulations, but as part of the ECP, the HACC team added a particle-based, hydrodynamics component, which is a major component of the HEP-SciDAC collaboration.
“LSST will go to smaller and smaller scales with its measurements and at these scales you have to understand what baryonic physics is doing to interpret the measurements,” Heitmann says.
Equipping both codes with hydrodynamic models provides a unique ability to test observations, Lukić says. Part of the team’s ALCC allocation is to further test this congruence. “If two codes based on entirely different mathematical methodologies precisely agree on some observation, then you are much more confident that you’ve got the numerical component right.”
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is a cabinet-level department of the United States Government concerned with the United States’ policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material. Its responsibilities include the nation’s nuclear weapons program; nuclear reactor production for the United States Navy; energy conservation; energy-related research; radioactive waste disposal; and domestic energy production. It also directs research in genomics. the Human Genome Project originated in a DOE initiative. DOE sponsors more research in the physical sciences than any other U.S. federal agency, the majority of which is conducted through its system of National Laboratories. The agency is led by the United States Secretary of Energy, and its headquarters are located in Southwest Washington, D.C., on Independence Avenue in the James V. Forrestal Building, named for James Forrestal, as well as in Germantown, Maryland.
Formation and consolidation
In 1942, during World War II, the United States started the Manhattan Project, a project to develop the atomic bomb, under the eye of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After the war in 1946, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was created to control the future of the project. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 also created the framework for the first National Laboratories. Among other nuclear projects, the AEC produced fabricated uranium fuel cores at locations such as Fernald Feed Materials Production Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1974, the AEC gave way to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was tasked with regulating the nuclear power industry and the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was tasked to manage the nuclear weapon; naval reactor; and energy development programs.
The 1973 oil crisis called attention to the need to consolidate energy policy. On August 4, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed into law The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977 (Pub.L. 95–91, 91 Stat. 565, enacted August 4, 1977), which created the Department of Energy. The new agency, which began operations on October 1, 1977, consolidated the Federal Energy Administration; the Energy Research and Development Administration; the Federal Power Commission; and programs of various other agencies. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, who served under Presidents Nixon and Ford during the Vietnam War, was appointed as the first secretary.
President Carter created the Department of Energy with the goal of promoting energy conservation and developing alternative sources of energy. He wanted to not be dependent on foreign oil and reduce the use of fossil fuels. With international energy’s future uncertain for America, Carter acted quickly to have the department come into action the first year of his presidency. This was an extremely important issue of the time as the oil crisis was causing shortages and inflation. With the Three-Mile Island disaster, Carter was able to intervene with the help of the department. Carter made switches within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in this case to fix the management and procedures. This was possible as nuclear energy and weapons are responsibility of the Department of Energy.
Recent
On March 28, 2017, a supervisor in the Office of International Climate and Clean Energy asked staff to avoid the phrases “climate change,” “emissions reduction,” or “Paris Agreement” in written memos, briefings or other written communication. A DOE spokesperson denied that phrases had been banned.
In a May 2019 press release concerning natural gas exports from a Texas facility, the DOE used the term ‘freedom gas’ to refer to natural gas. The phrase originated from a speech made by Secretary Rick Perry in Brussels earlier that month. Washington Governor Jay Inslee decried the term “a joke”.
Aindrila Mukhopadhyay and Maren Wehrs work on fungi-produced indigoidine, a sustainably produced indigo alternative, at JBEI. (Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab)
The Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), was selected as one of four Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers (BRC) to be awarded a combined total of $590 million to support innovative research on biofuels and bioproducts.
These new BRC awards, announced today by the U.S. Department of Energy, will kick off JBEI’s fourth five-year funding phase. “To meet our future energy needs, we will need versatile renewables like bioenergy as a low-carbon fuel for some parts of our transportation sector,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Continuing to fund the important scientific work conducted at our Bioenergy Research Centers is critical to ensuring these sustainable resources can be an efficient and affordable part of our clean energy future.”
Each center will initially receive $27.5 million for fiscal year 2023 with the possibility of additional funding for the next four years of the program cycle. JBEI and the other centers conduct basic science research to create biofuels and bioproducts from non-food plants. Each BRC has their own distinct research mission and programmatic goals, however, this new funding also specifically earmarks funds for all four BRCs to collaborate together on shared strategic goals.
“We are very excited that the Department of Energy has awarded us with another five years of funding to continue our path-breaking research,” said Jay Keasling, JBEI’s chief executive officer. “This work will enable the cost-effective production of carbon neutral biofuels and carbon negative bioproducts from lignocellulosic biomass. Usage of these fuels and products will reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels while significantly reducing the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere and contamination of the environment.”
JBEI was established in 2007 by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research within DOE’s Office of Science along with the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, led by the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center led by the University of Wisconsin—Madison in partnership with Michigan State University. The Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was added in 2017.
In addition to Berkeley Lab, JBEI’s partner institutions are the University of California (UC) campuses at Berkeley, Davis, San Diego, and Santa Barbara; the Iowa State University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Northwestern University, the University of Adelaide in Australia, the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories; the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Mi Yeon Lee and Ramana Pidatala examine sorghum plants in JBEI’s plant growth chamber. (Credit: Thor Swift/Berkeley Lab)
Since its founding fifteen years ago, JBEI research has produced 1,093 peer-reviewed publications, 120 patents, 176 technology licenses, and 12 startup companies. JBEI has long been a leader in establishing technologies that propel the U.S. bioeconomy forward in a competitive market. JBEI has made several significant scientific achievements in its prior funding phase, including:
Discovery of advanced feedstock agnostic biomass pretreatment solvents, such as ionic liquids and deep eutectic solvents. This included demonstrating a one-pot integrated ionic liquid-based biomass conversion technology that processed mixed woody biomass at a 1500-liter scale, validating the commercial feasibility of the technology by achieving an overall conversion efficiency from biomass to a biofuel of nearly 80%.
Creating new biosynthetic routes to advanced sustainable fuels for aviation and rocket fuel by harnessing the modular nature of polyketide synthases to develop new biosynthetic pathways that when expressed in bacterial hosts, convert sugars to polycyclopropanated fatty acid methyl ester (POP-FAME).
Engineering sorghum, switchgrass, and poplar to reduce lignin and other compounds that make them hard to break down while retaining the plants’ health and ability to grow. Some plants have also been engineered to produce value-added compounds that can be used to produce useful products such as renewable polymers and biodegradable plastics.
Developing a new framework to determine how much accumulation of value-added products in planta compensates for the costs of extraction.
In recent years, biomanufacturing (the biological production of fuels, products and components that are traditionally made through chemical processes) has become a vital part of the U.S. strategy to create sustainably produced and consistent supply chains. The recent National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative also establishes this national priority as a means to introduce new industries and employment opportunities in the U.S.
Biomanufacturing also holds significant promise to resolve multiple problems at once. JBEI recently partnered with Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit (ABPDU) and the California Energy Commission to develop a process that could convert forest debris and agricultural waste into usable fuel. These technologies are currently undergoing pilot testing and could be available for wider roll-out in the near future.
California is a recognized leader in the biotechnology sector and is well-poised to ramp up biomanufacturing in the state as a complementary industry in agricultural regions such as the Central and Imperial Valleys. JBEI is working on technologies to convert forest thinnings generated by healthy forest efforts, bioenergy crops, farm residues, and other biomass wastes into high value bio-based products and sustainable aviation fuels. This could offer new economic opportunities for farmers and rural communities in California, and throughout the west, and an opportunity to diversify and strengthen local economies. JBEI collaborates with farmers and rural industry in California to conduct studies of sorghum and other bioenergy crops in field tests.
JBEI is a well-known leader in developing the bioeconomy workforce of the future and partners with many organizations to host students, industry trainees, and postdocs at their Emeryville, CA headquarters. This proximity to the hub of the burgeoning biomanufacturing industry also makes JBEI alumni well-sought after for employment in the field. JBEI also organizes the annual Introductory College Level Experience in Microbiology (iCLEM) – a paid summer science intensive and college preparation program for under-resourced Bay Area high school students.
“JBEI partners with many universities and organizations around the country to train the diverse bioeconomy workforce of the future to steward a better planet,” said Keasling.
In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
richardmitnick
11:43 am on March 13, 2023 Permalink
| Reply Tags: "A Quick New Way to Screen Virus Proteins for Antibiotic Properties", Applied Research & Technology ( 10,907 ), Bacteriophages could hold the key to combating antibiotic resistance. Working with them just got a lot easier., Biology ( 1,215 ), Dual-Barcoded Shotgun Expression Library Sequencing (Dub-seq), Microbiology ( 86 ), The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, The problem arises when trying to isolate a single phage from the environment and determine which microbe it targets and how., There appears to be at least one type of phage for every known strain of bacteria and they are thought to be the most abundant biological entities on Earth., Virology ( 4 )
A rendering of bacteriophage viruses attacking a bacteria (Credit: nobeastsofierce/Adobe Stock)
Bacteriophages could hold the key to combating antibiotic resistance. Working with them just got a lot easier.
As conventional antibiotics continue to lose effectiveness against evolving pathogens, scientists are keen to employ the bacteria-killing techniques perfected by bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria.
One major challenge standing in their way is the difficulty of studying individual bacteriophage (phage) proteins and determining precisely how the virus wields these tools to kill their host bacteria. New research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could help speed things along.
“We developed a high-throughput genetic screening approach that can identify the part of the bacterial cell targeted by a potent type of phage weapon called ‘single-gene lysis proteins,’” said Vivek Mutalik, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Biosciences Area and co-author on a new study describing the work in Nature Chemical Biology [below]. “With rising antibiotic resistance, we urgently need antibiotic alternatives. Some of the smallest phages that we know of code for single-gene lysis proteins (Sgls), also known as ‘protein antibiotics,’ to inhibit key components of bacterial cell wall production that, when disrupted, consistently kill the cell.”
There appears to be at least one type of phage for every known strain of bacteria and they are thought to be the most abundant biological entities on Earth. In fact, there are an estimated 10^31 phage particles on the planet right now, or the equivalent of one trillion phages for every grain of sand. Each of these phages evolve alongside their chosen host strain, allowing them to counter bacterial resistance traits, as they arise, with improved biological weaponry.
This massive abundance, specificity, and efficacy means that there are plenty around to study, and that we should theoretically be able to use phages to control any harmful microbe. Phages are also harmless to non-bacterial cells, another reason they are so appealing as medicines and biocontrol tools.
The problem arises when trying to isolate a single phage from the environment and determine which microbe it targets and how. Scientists are often unable to assess phage-bacteria battles based on genomic sequence alone or study them in action because many bacteria can’t be cultured in a lab – and even if they could, there’s an inherent catch-22 of needing to know ahead of time which bacteria to culture in order to study the phages that infect and kill them.
To sidestep these obstacles and identify the cellular targets of Sgls, Mutalik and his colleagues used a technology the team previously invented called Dual-Barcoded Shotgun Expression Library Sequencing (Dub-seq). Dub-seq allows scientists to employ a coded library of DNA fragments to investigate how unknown genes function, and can be applied to complicated environmental samples that contain the DNA of many organisms – no culturing needed. In this study, the authors used six Sgls from six phages that infect different bacteria and identified the part of the bacterial cell wall or supporting molecules that each Sgl attacks. In collaboration with scientists from Texas A&M University, they conducted a detailed characterization of the function of one Sgl.
This work showed that the Sgl proteins target pathways for cell wall building that arose very early in the evolutionary history of bacteria and are still used by nearly all bacteria (including pathogenic bacteria). Since the Sgl proteins attack such fundamental and ubiquitous targets, they can kill bacteria other than the phage’s target strain – confirming they have great potential as antibiotics.
“Phages are extraordinary innovators when it comes to destroying bacteria. We’re really excited to uncover novel bacterial pathogen-targeting mechanisms that could be leveraged into therapies,” said first author Benjamin Adler, a postdoctoral fellow in Jennifer Doudna’s lab at UC Berkeley.
Now that the team has evaluated the Dub-seq approach for tackling this question, they can apply it to the thousands of single-gene lysis producing phages awaiting characterization in environmental samples that the team has collected from the ocean, soils, and even the human gut. The inspiration for the next breakthrough medicine could be in there, waiting.
In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
A Berkeley Lab-led team designs next-gen batteries at the atomic level.
Scanning transmission electron microscope images reveal the elemental distribution in a “disordered” solid electrolyte: Top row: titanium (Ti), zirconium (Zr), and tin (Sn); bottom row: hafnium (Hf), phosphorus (P), and oxygen (O). Scale bar: 50 nanometers. (Credit: Yan Zeng and Gerd Ceder/Berkeley Lab)
A team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Florida State University has designed a new blueprint for solid-state batteries that are less dependent on specific chemical elements, particularly critical metals that are challenging to source due to supply chain issues. Their work, reported recently in the journal Science [below], could advance solid-state batteries that are efficient and affordable.
Touted for their high energy density and superior safety, solid-state batteries could be a game-changer for the electric car industry. But developing one that is affordable and also conductive enough to power a car for hundreds of miles on a single charge has long been a challenging hurdle to overcome.
“Our work is the first to solve this problem by designing a solid electrolyte with not just one metal but with a team of affordable metals,” said co-first author Yan Zeng, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division.
In a lithium-ion battery, the electrolyte works like a transfer hub where lithium ions move with electric charge to either power a device or recharge the battery.
Like other batteries, solid-state batteries store energy and then release it to power devices. But rather than liquid or polymer gel electrolytes found in lithium-ion batteries, they use a solid electrolyte.
Government, research, and academia have heavily invested in the research and development of solid-state batteries because the liquid electrolytes designed for many commercial batteries are more prone to overheating, fire, and loss of charge.
However, many of the solid-state batteries constructed thus far are based on specific types of metals that are expensive and not available in large quantities. Some aren’t found at all in the United States.
For the current study, Zeng – along with Bin Ouyang, an assistant professor in chemistry and biochemistry at Florida State University – and senior author Gerbrand Ceder, a Berkeley Lab faculty senior scientist and UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering, demonstrated a new type of solid electrolyte consisting of a mix of various metal elements. Zeng and Ouyang first developed the idea for this work while finishing their postdoctoral research at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley under the supervision of Ceder.
The new materials could result in a more conductive solid electrolyte that is less dependent on a large quantity of an individual element.
Shown left: Conventional solid “ordered” electrolyte made of just one type of metal (blue spheres). The movement of lithium ions (yellow sphere) is slow and limited, thus hampering ion conductivity and battery performance. (Gray spheres represent oxygen.) Shown right: Ions move significantly faster through “disordered” solid electrolyte: Mixing different types of metals (blue, teal, and navy spheres) creates new pathways – much like the addition of expressways on a congested highway – through which lithium ions can move quickly through the electrolyte. (Credit: Jenny Nuss/Berkeley Lab)
In experiments at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, the researchers demonstrated the new solid electrolyte by synthesizing and testing several lithium-ion and sodium-ion materials with multiple mixed-metals.
They observed that the new multi-metal materials performed better than expected, displaying an ionic conductivity several orders of magnitude faster than the single-metal materials. Ionic conductivity is a measurement of how quickly lithium ions move to conduct electric charge.
The researchers theorize that mixing many different types of metals together creates new pathways – much like the addition of expressways on a congested highway – through which lithium ions can move quickly through the electrolyte. Without these pathways, the movement of lithium ions would be slow and limited when they travel through the electrolyte from one end of the battery to the other, Zeng explained.
To validate candidates for the multi-metal design, the researchers performed advanced theoretical calculations based on a method called density-functional theory on supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) [below]. Using scanning transmission electron microscopes (STEM) at the Molecular Foundry [below], the researchers confirmed that each electrolyte is made of only one type of material – what scientists call a “single phase” – with unusual distortions giving rise to the new ion transport pathways in its crystal structure.
The discovery enables new opportunities to design next-generation ionic conductors. The next step in this research is to apply the new approach that Zeng has developed with Ceder at Berkeley Lab to further explore and discover novel solid electrolyte materials that can improve battery performance even further.
This work represents one of the many ways in which experts at the Berkeley Lab Energy Storage Center are working to enable the nation’s transition to a clean, affordable, and resilient energy future.
Other scientists contributing to this work are Young-Woon Byeon and Zijian Cai from Berkeley Lab, Jue Liu from The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Lincoln Miara and Yan Wang from the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.
Science
Advances in solid-state batteries have primarily been driven by the discovery of superionic conducting structural frameworks that function as solid electrolytes. We demonstrate the ability of high-entropy metal cation mixes to improve ionic conductivity in a compound, which leads to less reliance on specific chemistries and enhanced synthesizability. The local distortions introduced into high-entropy materials give rise to an overlapping distribution of site energies for the alkali ions so that they can percolate with low activation energy. Experiments verify that high entropy leads to orders-of-magnitude higher ionic conductivities in lithium (Li)–sodium (Na) superionic conductor (Li-NASICON), sodium NASICON (Na-NASICON), and Li-garnet structures, even at fixed alkali content. We provide insight into selecting the optimal distortion and designing high-entropy superionic conductors across the vast compositional space.
One of the nation’s elite research universities, Florida State University preserves, expands, and disseminates knowledge in the sciences, technology, arts, humanities, and professions, while embracing a philosophy of learning strongly rooted in the traditions of the liberal arts.
FSU’s welcoming campus is located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in Florida, in a community that fosters free inquiry and embraces diversity, along with championship athletics, and a prime location in the heart of the state capital.
Florida State University is a public research university in Tallahassee, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida. Founded in 1851, it is located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in the state of Florida.
The university is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The university comprises 16 separate colleges and more than 110 centers, facilities, labs and institutes that offer more than 360 programs of study, including professional school programs. The university has an annual budget of over $1.7 billion and an annual economic impact of over $10 billion. Florida State is home to Florida’s only national laboratory, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, and is the birthplace of the commercially viable anti-cancer drug Taxol. Florida State University also operates the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida and one of the largest museum/university complexes in the nation. The university is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
For 2021, U.S. News & World Report ranked Florida State tied for the 19th best public university in the United States in the national university category.
FSU’s intercollegiate sports teams, commonly known by their “Florida State Seminoles” nickname, compete in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). In their 113-year history, Florida State’s varsity sports teams have won 20 national athletic championships and Seminole athletes have won 78 individual NCAA national championships.
Research
As one of the two primary research universities in Florida, Florida State University has long been associated with basic and advanced scientific research. Today the university engages in many areas of academic inquiry at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels.
Florida State University was awarded $268.5 million in annual research expenditures, in sponsored research in fiscal year 2016. FSU is one of the top 15 universities nationally receiving physical sciences funding from the National Science Foundation.
Florida State currently has 19 graduate degree programs in interdisciplinary research fields. Interdisciplinary programs merge disciplines into common areas where discoveries may be exploited by more than one method. Interdisciplinary research at FSU covers traditional subjects like chemistry, physics and engineering to social sciences.
In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
richardmitnick
4:25 pm on February 16, 2023 Permalink
| Reply Tags: "How a Record-Breaking Copper Catalyst Converts CO2 Into Liquid Fuels", Applied Research & Technology ( 10,907 ), Capturing real-time movies of copper nanoparticles (copper particles engineered at the scale of a billionth of a meter) as they convert CO2 and water into renewable fuels and chemicals., Chemistry ( 1,267 ), Material Sciences ( 611 ), Nanotechnology ( 726 ), The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Turning CO2 into new renewable solar fuels through artificial photosynthesis.
Researchers at Berkeley Lab have made real-time movies of copper nanoparticles as they evolve to convert carbon dioxide and water into renewable fuels and chemicals. Their new insights could help advance the next generation of solar fuels.
Artist’s rendering of a copper nanoparticle as it evolves during CO2 electrolysis: Copper nanoparticles (left) combine into larger metallic copper “nanograins” (right) within seconds of the electrochemical reaction, reducing CO2 into new multicarbon products. (Credit: Yao Yang/Berkeley Lab)
Since the 1970s, scientists have known that copper has a special ability to transform carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels. But for many years, scientists have struggled to understand how this common metal works as an electrocatalyst, a mechanism that uses energy from electrons to chemically transform molecules into different products.
Now, a research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has gained new insight by capturing real-time movies of copper nanoparticles (copper particles engineered at the scale of a billionth of a meter) as they convert CO2 and water into renewable fuels and chemicals: ethylene, ethanol, and propanol, among others. The work was reported in the journal Nature [below] last week.
“This is very exciting. After decades of work, we’re finally able to show – with undeniable proof – how copper electrocatalysts excel in CO2 reduction,” said Peidong Yang, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences and Chemical Sciences Divisions who led the study. Yang is also a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley. “Knowing how copper is such an excellent electrocatalyst brings us steps closer to turning CO2 into new, renewable solar fuels through artificial photosynthesis.”
Advancing Solar Fuels With Copper Nanograins.
Video of a 4D-STEM experiment: Yao Yang and team used the new electrochemical liquid cell to observe copper nanoparticles (ranging in size from 7 nanometers to 18 nanometers) evolve into active nanograins during CO2 electrolysis – a process that uses electricity to drive a reaction on the surface of an electrocatalyst. The new electrochemical liquid cell allows researchers to resolve images of objects smaller than 10 nanometers.
(Credit: Yao Yang/Berkeley Lab. Courtesy of Nature.)
The work was made possible by combining a new imaging technique called operando 4D electrochemical liquid-cell STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy) with a soft X-ray probe to investigate the same sample environment: copper nanoparticles in liquid. First author Yao Yang, a UC Berkeley Miller postdoctoral fellow, conceived the groundbreaking approach under the guidance of Peidong Yang while working toward his Ph.D. in chemistry at Cornell University.
Scientists who study artificial photosynthesis materials and reactions have wanted to combine the power of an electron probe with X-rays, but the two techniques typically can’t be performed by the same instrument.
Electron microscopes (such as STEM or TEM) use beams of electrons and excel at characterizing the atomic structure in parts of a material. In recent years, 4D STEM (or “2D raster of 2D diffraction patterns using scanning transmission electron microscopy”) instruments, such as those at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry [below], have pushed the boundaries of electron microscopy even further, enabling scientists to map out atomic or molecular regions in a variety of materials, from hard metallic glass to soft, flexible films.
On the other hand, soft (or lower-energy) X-rays are useful for identifying and tracking chemical reactions in real time in an operando, or real-world, environment.
But now, scientists can have the best of both worlds. At the heart of the new technique is an electrochemical “liquid cell” sample holder with remarkable versatility. A thousand times thinner than a human hair, the device is compatible with both STEM and X-ray instruments.
The electrochemical liquid cell’s ultrathin design allows reliable imaging of delicate samples while protecting them from electron beam damage. A special electrode custom-designed by co-author Cheng Wang, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source [below], enabled the team to conduct X-ray experiments with the electrochemical liquid cell. Combining the two allows researchers to comprehensively characterize electrochemical reactions in real time and at the nanoscale.
Getting granular
During 4D-STEM experiments, Yao Yang and team used the new electrochemical liquid cell to observe copper nanoparticles (ranging in size from 7 nanometers to 18 nanometers) evolve into active nanograins during CO2 electrolysis – a process that uses electricity to drive a reaction on the surface of an electrocatalyst.
The experiments revealed a surprise: copper nanoparticles combined into larger metallic copper “nanograins” within seconds of the electrochemical reaction.
To learn more, the team turned to Wang, who pioneered a technique known as “resonant soft X-ray scattering (RSoXS) for soft materials,” at the Advanced Light Source more than 10 years ago.
Yao Yang (center) loads a sample into the soft X-ray scattering chamber as Cheng Wang (left) and Peidong Yang (right) observe at the RSoXS Beamline (Beamline 11.0.1.2) at the Advanced Light Source. (Credit: Thor Swift/Berkeley Lab)
With help from Wang, the research team used the same electrochemical liquid cell, but this time during RSoXS experiments, to determine whether copper nanograins facilitate CO2 reduction. Soft X-rays are ideal for studying how copper electrocatalysts evolve during CO2 reduction, Wang explained. By using RSoXS, researchers can monitor multiple reactions between thousands of nanoparticles in real time, and accurately identify chemical reactants and products.
The RSoXS experiments at the Advanced Light Source – along with additional evidence gathered at Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) – proved that metallic copper nanograins serve as active sites for CO2 reduction.
(Metallic copper, also known as copper(0), is a form of the element copper.)
During CO2 electrolysis, the copper nanoparticles change their structure during a process called “electrochemical scrambling.” The copper nanoparticles’ surface layer of oxide degrades, creating open sites on the copper surface for CO2 molecules to attach, explained Peidong Yang. And as CO2 “docks” or binds to the copper nanograin surface, electrons are then transferred to CO2, causing a reaction that simultaneously produces ethylene, ethanol, and propanol along with other multicarbon products.
“The copper nanograins essentially turn into little chemical manufacturing factories,” Yao Yang said.
Further experiments at the Molecular Foundry, the Advanced Light Source, and CHESS revealed that size matters. All of the 7-nanometer copper nanoparticles participated in CO2 reduction, whereas the larger nanoparticles did not. In addition, the team learned that only metallic copper can efficiently reduce CO2 into multicarbon products. The findings have implications for “rationally designing efficient CO2 electrocatalysts,” Peidong Yang said.
The new study also validated Peidong Yang’s findings from 2017: That the 7-nanometer-sized copper nanoparticles require low inputs of energy to start CO2 reduction. As an electrocatalyst, the 7-nanometer copper nanoparticles required a record-low driving force that is about 300 millivolts less than typical bulk copper electrocatalysts. The best-performing catalysts that produce multicarbon products from CO2 typically operate at high driving force of 1 volt.
The copper nanograins could potentially boost the energy efficiency and productivity of some catalysts designed for artificial photosynthesis, a field of research that aims to produce solar fuels from sunlight, water, and CO2. Currently, researchers within the Department of Energy-funded Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA) plan to use the copper nanograin catalysts in the design of future solar fuel devices.
“The technique’s ability to record real-time movies of a chemical process opens up exciting opportunities to study many other electrochemical energy conversion processes. It’s a huge breakthrough, and it would not have been possible without Yao and his pioneering work,” Peidong Yang said.
(From left to right): Julian Feijoo, Jianbo Jin, Cheng Wang, Peidong Yang, Yao Yang, Inwhan Roh, and Maria Fonseca Guzman at the Advanced Light Source. (Credit: Thor Swift/Berkeley Lab)
Researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and Cornell University contributed to the work. Other authors on the paper include co-first authors Sheena Louisa and Sunmoon Yu, former UC Berkeley Ph.D. students in Peidong Yang’s group, along with Jianbo Jin, Inwhan Roh, Chubai Chen, Maria V. Fonseca Guzman, Julian Feijóo, Peng-Cheng Chen, Hongsen Wang, Christopher Pollock, Xin Huang, Yu-Tsuan Shao, Cheng Wang, David A. Muller, and Héctor D. Abruña.
Parts of the experiments were performed by Yao Yang at Cornell under the supervision of Héctor Abruña, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and David A. Muller, professor of engineering.
This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.
In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
A new type of polysulfate compound can be used to make polymer film capacitors that store and discharge high density of electrical energy while tolerating heat and electric fields beyond the limits of existing polymer film capacitors. (Credit: Yi Liu and He (Henry) Li/Berkeley Lab)
Flexible polymers made with a new generation of the Nobel-winning “click chemistry” reaction find use in capacitors and other applications.
Society’s growing demand for high-voltage electrical technologies – including pulsed power systems, cars and electrified aircraft, and renewable energy applications – requires a new generation of capacitors that store and deliver large amounts of energy under intense thermal and electrical conditions. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Scripps Research have now developed a new polymer-based device that efficiently handles record amounts of energy while withstanding extreme temperatures and electric fields. The device is composed of materials synthesized via a next-generation version of the chemical reaction for which three scientists won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Polymer film capacitors are electrical components that store and release energy within an electric field using a thin plastic layer as the insulating layer. They make up 50% of the global high voltage capacitor market and offer advantages including light weight, low cost, mechanical flexibility, and robust cyclability. But state-of-the-art polymer film capacitors decrease dramatically in performance with increasing temperature and voltages. Developing new materials with improved tolerance for heat and electric fields is paramount; and creating polymers with near-perfect chemistry offers a way to do so.
“Our work adds a new class of electrically robust polymers to the table. It opens many possibilities to the exploration of more robust, high performing materials,” said Yi Liu, a chemist at Berkeley Lab and senior author on the Joule [below] study reporting the work. Liu is the Facility Director of Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis at the Molecular Foundry [below], a DOE Office of Science user facility at Berkeley Lab.
In addition to remaining stable when subjected to high temperatures, a capacitor needs to be a strong “dielectric” material, meaning that it remains a strong insulator when subjected to high voltages. However, few known materials systems exist that deliver both thermal stability and dielectric strength. This scarcity is due to a lack of reliable and convenient synthesis methods, as well as a lack of fundamental understanding of the relationship between polymer structure and properties. “Improving the thermal stability of existing films while retaining their electrical insulating strength is an ongoing materials challenge,” said Liu.
A long-term collaboration between researchers at the Molecular Foundry and Scripps Research Institute has now met that challenge. They used a simple and quick chemical reaction developed in 2014 that swaps out fluorine atoms in compounds that contain sulfur-fluoride bonds, to yield long polymer chains of sulfate molecules called polysulfates. This Sulfur-Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx) reaction is a next-generation version of the click chemistry reaction pioneered by K. Barry Sharpless, a chemist at Scripps Research and two-time Nobel laureate in Chemistry, along with Peng Wu, also a chemist at Scripps Research. The near-perfect yet easy-to-run reactions join separate molecular entities through strong chemical bonds that form between different reactive groups. Liu’s team had originally used a variety of thermal analysis tools to examine the basic thermal and mechanical properties of these new materials.
Polysulfates with excellent thermal properties are casted into flexible free-standing films. High-temperature, high-voltage capacitors based on such films show state-of-the-art energy storage properties at 150 degrees Celsius. Such power capacitors are promising for improving the energy efficiency and reliability of integrated power systems in demanding applications such as electrified transportation. (Credit: Yi Liu and He (Henry) Li/Berkeley Lab)
As part of a Berkeley Lab program to synthesize and identify novel materials that could be useful in energy storage, Liu and his colleagues now find that, surprisingly, the polysulfates have outstanding dielectric properties, especially at high electric fields and temperatures. “Several commercial and lab-generated polymers are known for their dielectric properties, but polysulfates had never been considered. The marriage between polysulfates and dielectrics is one of the novelties here,” said He Li, a postdoctoral researcher in the Molecular Foundry and in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, and lead author of the study.
Inspired by the excellent baseline dielectric properties offered by polysulfates, the researchers deposited extremely thin layers of aluminum oxide (Al2O3) onto thin films of the material to engineer capacitor devices with enhanced energy storage performance. They discovered that the fabricated capacitors exhibited excellent mechanical flexibility, withstood electric fields of more than 750 million volts per meter, and performed efficiently at temperatures up to 150 degrees Celsius. In comparison, today’s benchmark commercial polymer capacitors only function reliably at temperatures lower than 120 degrees Celsius. Above that temperature, they can only withstand electric fields smaller than 500 million volts per meter, and the energy efficiency severely drops by over half.
The work opens new possibilities for exploring robust, high performing materials for energy storage. “We have provided deep insight into the underlying mechanisms that contribute to the material’s excellent performance,” said Wu.
The polymer strikes a balance of electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties, likely due to the sulfate linkages introduced by the click chemistry reaction. Because modular chemistry accommodates extraordinary structural diversity and scalability, the same route could offer a viable path to new polymers with higher performance that meet even more demanding operational conditions.
The polysulfates are strong contenders to become new state-of-the-art polymer dielectrics. Once researchers overcome barriers in large-scale manufacturing processes for thin film materials, the devices could greatly improve the energy efficiency of integrated power systems in electric vehicles and enhance their operational reliability.
“Who could have imagined that a wispy sulfate polymer film could fend off lightning and fire, two of the most destructive forces in the universe?!” said Sharpless.
“We’re continuously pushing the envelope of thermal and electrical properties, and accelerating the lab-to-market transition,” Liu added.
The technology is now available for licensing by contacting ipo@lbl.gov.
The work received funding from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Health. The work was carried out at the Molecular Foundry.
Figure 1. Chemical synthesis and electronic structure characterization
(A) Schematic of the polysulfates P1, P2, and P3 based on SuFEx click chemistry.
(B) Frequency-dependent dielectric spectra of dielectric constant (k) of polysulfates P1, P2, and P3 obtained at 30°C.
(C) Calculated density of states (DOS) and the corresponding computed electronic band gap of polysulfates P1, P2, and P3.
(D) Correlation between glass transition temperature and optical band gap of polysulfates P1, P2, and P3 and commercial aromatic dielectric polymers.[23]
All three polysulfates display desirable k values (e.g., 3.4–3.8 at 104 Hz) and low loss tangents (tan δ), as revealed by the frequency-dependent dielectric spectra (Figures 1B and S6). The experimental optical Eg values (obtained from UV-vis spectroscopy) are in the range between 4.36 and 3.90 eV and follow the order of P1 > P2 > P3, which agree favorably with the trend of the simulated electronic Eg values (obtained from density functional theory [DFT] calculations) (Figures 1C and S7–S9). When comparing the Eg and Tg values against the major commercial dielectric polymers containing aromatic repeat units, including PEEK, PEI, FPE, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene naphthalate (PEN), polyamideimide (PAI), and PIs (Kapton PI and Upilex-S PI) (which follow an empirical inverse correlation between Eg and Tg), the polysulfates show an apparent deviation with decent Tg values despite their larger Eg values (Figures 1D and S10). In addition, the polysulfates P1–P3 display lower computed mass densities (∼1.10–1.20 g cm−3) than those of commercial dielectric polymers (Figure S11; Table S1). The combination of lightweight, wide Eg, large k, low tan δ, along with high Tg is likely essential for high-temperature film capacitor applications.
See the science paper for more instructive imagery.
In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
Scientists show how 30% protected land targets may not safeguard biodiversity hotspots and may negatively affect other sectors – and how data and analysis can support effective conservation and land use planning.
Credit: ricardoreitmeyer/iStock.
Although more than half the world’s countries have committed to protecting at least 30% of land and oceans by 2030 in support of biodiversity, various questions emerge: Where and what type of land should be protected? How will new land protections impact carbon emissions and climate change, or the land needed for energy and food production? As a result, many decision makers are left questioning how to take action around protecting new land as they set their sights on achieving ambitious targets to preserve biodiversity in regions around the globe. New science tools can shed light on some of those questions.
A recent study [GCB-BIOENERGY (below)] led by climate scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) aims to inform the discussion around how protecting additional land to meet conservation goals may impact land use (such as agricultural) and land cover (such as grass, water, or vegetation). The research is among the first to explore how potential pathways to achieve these bold targets affect agricultural expansion, and its findings suggest that meeting the 30% protection targets could lead to substantial regional shifts in land use and in some cases still fail to protect the world’s most biodiverse hotspots.
“It is important that we protect land if we want to stem additional ecosystem degradation,” said the paper’s lead author Alan Di Vittorio, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Area. “But protecting land entails tradeoffs with other land uses and could have negative impacts on the agricultural sector, such as less land for bioenergy crops or less forest land for timber.”
Amount of currently protected forest, shrubland, and grassland as the percent of total forest, shrubland, and grassland. a) Protected land that is suitable for agriculture. b) Protected land that is unsuitable for agriculture. (Credit: Alan Di Vittorio/Berkeley Lab)
With biodiversity on the line, escalating food demands, and finite amounts of land available, the study explores the competing priorities that exist when selecting new lands for protection in order to minimize potential downsides for the agricultural sector and maximize progress toward well-defined conservation goals (such as clean water or wildlife habitat). Through a detailed analysis of a series of computer simulations, the researchers estimated the effects of approximately doubling currently protected land to meet the 30% protected land target. They incorporated new spatially explicit land availability data into their modeling to represent land that is suitable or unsuitable for agriculture; and protected, highly protected, or minimally protected. The study results indicate that detailed, region-specific land information is an important factor when selecting new lands for protection and estimating the potential impacts to agriculture of the resulting reduction in land availability.
One of the most notable findings is that the land used for growing crops for conversion into biofuels could be significantly impacted by the doubling of current protected areas. Under this scenario, the analysis showed a 10% global decrease in these bioenergy croplands to maintain food production, with that number climbing far higher in some regions (46% decrease in Russia and a 39% decrease in Canada). Some of the losses were partially offset elsewhere, such as in Northern South America where the analysis showed a 36% increase in bioenergy feedstock land.
The research also showed that for half of the 384 regions modeled, it would be possible to meet the 30% target by protecting just agriculturally unsuitable land, however this land may not coincide with one or more of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots. For example, the Northern Africa region could meet its 30% target by protecting only the desert, which contains few ecologically sensitive areas and thus has limited benefit to biodiversity. The study therefore illustrates that the uneven distribution of species across an area may have significant bearing when it comes to understanding and managing changes in land use, and how this impacts biodiversity.
Di Vittorio concludes, “Our study adds to the literature exploring how we can meet both environmental and human needs as countries around the world unite around the goal of protecting land for biodiversity.”
This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. GCB-BIOENERGY
FIG 1
Percent of initial convertible land available to agricultural expansion in the (a) LOW and (b) HIGH availability scenarios, by water basin within each Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) region. The black and white lines in (a) delineate GCAM regions and Moirai countries, respectively. Map lines delineate study areas and do not necessarily depict accepted national boundaries.
In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
1989: The Loma Prieta Earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area on the evening of the third game of the World Series.
Modeling the effects of earthquakes on homes, businesses, and infrastructure is about to get a lot easier, thanks to advanced simulations performed on the world’s fastest supercomputers. (Credit: SUNGYOON/Adobe Stock)
Berkeley Lab’s supercomputer-generated simulations will soon be accessible on an open-access website.
Accurately modeling the effects of an earthquake is possible, but it requires intricate physics-based models that can only be run on advanced supercomputers. The data from such models are invaluable for the earthquake research community and engineers seeking to build and retrofit earthquake-resilient homes, businesses, and infrastructure. However, access to the powerful computers required is extremely limited.
For several years, a team of scientists from The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has collaborated with the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) to fill the access gap by adapting sophisticated, full-scale ground-motion simulations into datasets that can be stored and readily distributed on everyday computers. These datasets are free to the public.
Now, the collaboration is planning to release the most accurate and detailed simulations to date, which initially will capture earthquake motions across the San Francisco Bay Area and later expand to other regions of the state.
Next-Generation Earthquake Simulations for the Bay Area.
A set of animations derived from an advanced new earthquake simulation software, called EQSIM, showing both seismic wave propagation through the ground (left) and corresponding evolution of building damage (right). This simulation is of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake from a rupture on the northern Hayward fault. Another simulation shows an earthquake of the same magnitude originating from a rupture on the southern part of the Hayward fault. (Credit: David McCallen)
“With our simulation software, called EQSIM, ground motion simulations of unprecedented fidelity and unprecedented spatial coverage can now be generated,” said project leader David McCallen, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area and leader of the Critical Infrastructure Initiative.
To give a sense of how detailed these models are, McCallen notes that there is ground motion data at approximately every two meters of land throughout the Bay Area, which sits on several active faults, including the Hayward and San Andreas faults.
“The regional ground motion simulations are so computationally intensive that they require the absolute largest and fastest computers that are available anywhere in the world.”
The EQSIM software was built and tested using the Summit supercomputer at The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Perlmutter system at The DOE’s Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).
Sharing the massive amounts of data needed to design and operate this software across different platforms was accomplished through the Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), created and managed by Berkeley Lab.
McCallen and his collaborators will further enhance their simulations using the newest DOE supercomputer, ORNL’s Frontier, when it becomes available in early 2023.
“The plan is we at Berkeley Lab will perform these extremely intense simulations on DOE’s supercomputers and we will work closely with PEER to appropriately make these simulated motions available to the broad earth science and earthquake engineering communities, as well as organizations responsible for disaster response,” said McCallen.
PEER is a multi-institution earthquake research and education center headquartered at UC Berkeley. Part of the center’s mission is to develop and maintain ground motions datasets made from actual recordings of earthquakes occurring around the world. These valuable resources are used by thousands of research teams, but as PEER director and civil engineering professor Khalid Mosalam points out, there is simply not enough real-world data to fill the gaps in our understanding nor to adequately prepare for future earthquakes.
“Particularly, data is very limited for large magnitude events. In an expected big earthquake near the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles, critical infrastructure, tall buildings, and important bridges will be subjected to high magnitude ground motions, so developing such motions from simulations is essential for community safety and resilience,” said Mosalam. “The upcoming simulation-based dataset will be instrumental for facilitating deeper understanding of the hazard, performance, and overall resiliency of California, allowing officials to identify the infrastructure systems and structures that pose the largest risk in an effective and accurate manner, and properly allocate resources.”
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EQSIM Shakes Up Earthquake Research at the Exascale Level
Figure 1. The multiscale computational challenge of fault-to-structure simulations starting from the earthquake source, continuing through regional-scale wave propagation in a heterogeneous earth at a scale of hundreds of kilometers (“Regional geophysics domain”) and ending at local interaction between complex incident seismic waves with a soil-structure system at a scale of 30–50 m (“Local engineering system domain”). (Credit: David McCallen)
Since 2017, EQSIM – one of several projects supported by The U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) – has been breaking new ground in efforts to understand how seismic activity affects the structural integrity of buildings and infrastructure. While small-scale models and historical observations are helpful, they only scratch the surface of quantifying a geological event as powerful and far-reaching as a major earthquake.
EQSIM bridges this gap by using physics-based supercomputer simulations to predict the ramifications of an earthquake on buildings and infrastructure and create synthetic earthquake records that can provide much larger analytical datasets than historical, single-event records.
To accomplish this, however, has presented a number of challenges, noted EQSIM principal investigator David McCallen, a senior scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Earth and Environmental Sciences Area and director of the Center for Civil Engineering Earthquake Research at the University of Nevada Reno.
“The prediction of future earthquake motions that will occur at a specific site is a challenging problem because the processes associated with earthquakes and the response of structures is very complicated,” he said. “When the earthquake fault ruptures, it releases energy in a very complex way, and that energy manifests and propagates as seismic waves through the Earth. In addition, the Earth is very heterogeneous and the geology is very complicated. So when those waves arrive at the site or piece of infrastructure you are concerned with, they interact with that infrastructure in a very complicated way.”
Over the last decade-plus, researchers have been applying high-performance computing to model these processes to more accurately predict site-specific motions and better understand what forces a structure is subjected to during a seismic event.
“The challenge is that tremendous computer horsepower is required to do this,” McCallen said. “It‘s hard to simulate ground motions at a frequency content that is relevant to engineered structures. It takes super big models that run very efficiently. So it’s been very challenging computationally, and for some time we didn’t have the computational horsepower to do that and extrapolate to that.”
Fortunately, the emergence of exascale computing has changed the equation.
“The excitement of ECP is that we now have these new computers that can do a billion billion calculations per second with a tremendous volume of memory, and for the first time we are on the threshold of being able to solve, with physics-based models, this very complex problem,” McCallen said. “So our whole goal with EQSIM was to advance the state of computational capabilities so we could model all the way from the fault rupture to the waves propagating through the earth to the waves interacting with the structure – with the idea that ultimately we want to reduce the uncertainty in earthquake ground motions and how a structure is going to respond to earthquakes.”
A Team Effort
Over the last five years, using both the Cori and Perlmutter[above] supercomputers at Berkeley Lab and the Summit system [above] at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the EQSIM team has focused primarily on modeling earthquake scenarios in the San Francisco Bay Area.
These supercomputing resources helped them create a detailed, regional-scale model that includes all of the necessary geophysics modeling features, such as 3D geology, earth surface topography, material attenuation, non-reflecting boundaries, and fault rupture.
“We’ve gone from simulating this model at 2-2.5 Hz at the start of this project to simulating more than 300 billion grid points at 10 Hz, which is a huge computational lift,” McCallen said.
Other notable achievements of this ECP project include:
Making important advances to the SW4 geophysics code, including how it is coupled to local engineering models of the soil and structure system.
Developing a schema for handling the huge datasets used in these models. “For a single earthquake we are running 272 TB of data, so you have to have a strategy for storing, visualizing, and exploiting that data,” McCallen said.
Developing a visualization tool that allows very efficient browsing of this data.
“The development of the computational workflow and how everything fits together is one of our biggest achievements, starting with the initiation of the earthquake fault structure all the way through to the response of the engineered system,” McCallen said. “We are solving one high-level problem but also a whole suite of lower-level challenges to make this work. The ability to envision, implement, and optimize that workflow has been absolutely essential.”
None of this could have happened without the contributions of multiple partners across a spectrum of science, engineering, and mathematics, he emphasized. Earth engineers, seismologists, computer scientists, and applied mathematicians from Berkeley Lab and Livermore Lab formed the multidisciplinary, closely integrated team necessary to address the computational challenges.
“This is an inherently multidisciplinary problem,” McCallen said. “You are starting with the way a fault ruptures and the way waves propagate through the Earth, and that is the domain of a seismologist. Then those waves are arriving at a site where you have a structure that has found a non-soft soil, so it transforms into a geotechnical engineering and structural engineering problem.”
It doesn’t stop there, he added. “You absolutely need this melding of people who have the scientific and engineering domain knowledge, but they are enabled by the applied mathematicians who can develop really fast and efficient algorithms and the computer scientists who know how to program and optimally parallelize and handle all the I/O on these really big problems.”
Looking ahead, the EQSIM team is already involved in another DOE project with an office that deals with energy systems. Their goal is to transition and leverage everything they’ve done through the ECP program to look at earthquake effects on distributed energy systems. This new project involves applying these same capabilities to programs within the DOE Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, which is concerned with the integrity of energy systems in the U.S. The team is also working to make its large earthquake datasets available as open access to both the research community and practicing engineers.
“That is common practice for historical measured earthquake records, and we want to do that with synthetic earthquake records that give you a lot more data because you have motions everywhere, not just locations where you had an instrument measuring an earthquake,” McCallen said.
Being involved with ECP has been a key boost to this work, he added, enabling EQSIM to push the envelope of computing performance.
“We have extended the ability of doing these direct, high-frequency simulations a tremendous amount,” he said. “We have a plot that shows the increase in performance and capability, and it has gone up orders of magnitude, which is really important because we need to run really big problems really, really fast. So that, coupled with the exascale hardware, has really made a difference. We’re doing things now that we only thought about doing a decade ago, like resolving high-frequency ground motions. It is really an exciting time for those of us who are working on simulating earthquakes.”
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Earthquake Network project smartphone ap is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.
The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.
Get the app in the Google Play store.
Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015 Meet The Quake-Catcher Network
The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.
After almost eight years at Stanford University (US), and a year at California Institute of Technology (US), the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California (US) Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).
The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).
The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).
There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.
Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.
USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.
If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.
BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.
Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.
Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.
EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.
EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.
EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards
and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.
EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.
ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States
The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.
Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.
Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.
Part of the Solution
Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.
Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.
System Goal
The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.
Current Status
The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.
In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.
This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.
Authorities
The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.
For More Information
Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225
The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.
The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.
ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.
ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.
Earthquake Early Warning Background
The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.
Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:
Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems
However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.
GNSS-Global Navigational Satellite System
GNSS station | Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array, Central Washington University (US)
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In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
richardmitnick
11:43 am on February 7, 2023 Permalink
| Reply Tags: "Microscopy Images Could Lead to New Ways to Control Excitons for Quantum Computing", Applied Research & Technology ( 10,907 ), “Moiré superlattice”: a larger periodic pattern that arises from the overlap of two smaller patterns with similar but not identical spacing of elements., Basic Research ( 16,197 ), For the first time researchers have created and directly observed highly localized excitons confined in simple stacks of atomically thin materials., Optoelectronics ( 9 ), Quantum Computing ( 401 ), The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The unit-cell averaged electron microscopy-derived composite image shows excitons in green. The moiré unit cell outlined in the lower right of the exciton map is about 8 nanometers in size. (Credit: Sandhya Susarla and Peter Ercius/Berkeley Lab)
Excitons are drawing attention as possible quantum bits (qubits) in tomorrow’s quantum computers and are central to optoelectronics and energy-harvesting processes. However, these charge-neutral quasiparticles, which exist in semiconductors and other materials, are notoriously difficult to confine and manipulate. Now, for the first time, researchers have created and directly observed highly localized excitons confined in simple stacks of atomically thin materials. The work confirms theoretical predictions and opens new avenues for controlling excitons with custom-built materials.
“The idea that you can localize excitons on specific lattice sites by simply stacking these 2D materials is exciting because it has a variety of applications, from designer optoelectronic devices to materials for quantum information science,” said Archana Raja, co-lead of the project and a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Molecular Foundry [below], whose group led the device fabrication and optical spectroscopy characterization.
The team fabricated devices by stacking layers of tungsten disulfide (WS2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe2). A small mismatch in the spacing of atoms in the two materials gave rise to a moiré superlattice, a larger periodic pattern that arises from the overlap of two smaller patterns with similar but not identical spacing of elements. Using state-of-the-art electron microscopy tools, the researchers collected structural and spectroscopic data on the devices, combining information from hundreds of measurements to determine the probable locations of excitons.
“We used basically all the most advanced capabilities on our most advanced microscope to do this experiment,” said Peter Ercius, who led the imaging work at the Molecular Foundry’s National Center for Electron Microscopy. “We were pushing the boundaries of everything we can do, from making the sample to analyzing the sample to doing the theory.”
Theoretical calculations, led by Steven Louie, a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and distinguished professor of physics at UC Berkeley, revealed that large atomic reconstructions take place in the stacked materials, which modulate the electronic structure to form a periodic array of “traps” where excitons become localized. Discovery of this direct relationship between the structural changes and the localization of excitons overturns prior understanding of these systems and establishes a new approach to designing optoelectronic materials.
The team’s findings are described in a paper published in the journal Science [below] with postdoctoral fellows Sandhya Susarla (now a professor at Arizona State University) and Mit H. Naik as co-lead authors. Next the team will explore approaches to tuning the moiré lattice on demand and making the phenomenon more robust to material disorder.
In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
A new study connecting extreme thunderstorms and tree deaths suggests the tropics will see more major blowdown events in a warming world.
Members of NGEE-Tropics visit what they named “Blowdown Gardens,” an area that experienced windthrow near one of their field sites in the Amazon. Researchers have found a relationship between atmospheric conditions and large areas of tree death. Credit: Jeff Chambers/Berkeley Lab.
Tropical forests are crucial for sucking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But they’re also subject to intense storms that can cause “windthrow” – the uprooting or breaking of trees. These downed trees decompose, potentially turning a forest from a carbon sink into a carbon source.
A new study finds that more extreme thunderstorms from climate change will likely cause a greater number of large windthrow events in the Amazon rainforest. This is one of the few ways that researchers have developed a link between storm conditions in the atmosphere and forest mortality on land, helping fill a major gap in models.
“Building this link between atmospheric dynamics and damage at the surface is very important across the board,” said Jeff Chambers, a senior faculty scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and director of the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE)-Tropics project, which performed the research. “It’s not just for the tropics. It’s high-latitude, low-latitude, temperate-latitude, here in the U.S.”
This false-color aerial image from Landsat 8 shows several examples of windthrow. The brownish-red region is a recent windthrow, while the bright green represents an older windthrow populated with new plant growth. (Credit: Landsat 8/NASA/USGS)
Researchers found that the Amazon will likely experience 43% more large blowdown events (of 25,000 square meters or more) by the end of the century. The area of the Amazon likely to see extreme storms that trigger large windthrows will also increase by about 50%. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications [below] on Jan. 6.
Fig. 1: The spatial pattern of windthrows and mean afternoon convective available potential energy (CAPE).
[a] 1012 Windthrow events identified manually using Landsat 8 images, green color in the background represents forested area. [b] Windthrow density in 2.5° × 2.5° grids. [c] Contour lines of windthrow density (counts per 10,000 km2) over the mean afternoon CAPE at 0.25° resolution. [d] Mean afternoon CAPE aggregated in 2.5° × 2.5° grids using the 90th percentile over the grid.
Fig. 2: The relationship maps convective available potential energy (CAPE) to windthrow density and future increase in CAPE simulated by Earth system models under the high-emission scenario.
[a] Mean windthrow density as a function of CAPE values, calculated using the data shown in Figs. 1a, [c]. The boundaries of the CAPE bins were selected to have the same number of observed windthrows in each bin to avoid noise at the tails. The error bars (SD) of the windthrow density were generated using 10,000 bootstrapped samples of the 1012 windthrow points. The lower and upper CAPE bin boundaries were expanded to a minimum of 0 and a maximum of infinity with an assumption that the windthrow density is similar for the neighboring CAPE values. [b] The area of the Amazon region in each CAPE bin for the past 30 years and for the last 30 years of the century. The error bars (SD) of future CAPE were generated using scaled 2070–2099 CMIP6 CAPE from 10 ESMs. [c] The increase in area with CAPE over 1023 J kg^−1, with orange pixels representing mean 1990–2019 ERA 5 CAPE higher than 1023 J kg^−1 and red pixels representing mean scaled 2070–2099 CMIP6 CAPE higher than 1023 J kg^−1. [d] Ensemble-mean increase of CAPE from the current climate (1990–2014) to the future climate (2070–2099) under the SSP585 scenario. Since CMIP6 models provide historic simulations only up to 2015, data from 2015 to 2020 are not included. Stippling indicates regions where all 10 ESMs agree on the increase of CAPE, with CAPE calculated using daily surface pressure and atmospheric profiles at standard pressure levels.
“We want to know what these extreme storms and windthrows mean in terms of the carbon budget and carbon dynamics, and for carbon sinks in the forests,” Chambers said. While downed trees slowly release carbon as they decompose, the open forest becomes host to new plants that pull carbon dioxide from the air. “It’s a complicated system, and there are still a lot of pieces of the puzzle that we’re working on. In order to answer the question more quantitatively, we need to build out the land-atmosphere links in Earth system models.”
To find the link between air and land, researchers compared a map of more than 1,000 large windthrows with atmospheric data. They found that a measurement known as CAPE, the “convective available potential energy,” was a good predictor of major blowdowns. CAPE measures the amount of energy available to move parcels of air vertically, and a high value of CAPE often leads to thunderstorms. More extreme storms can come with intense vertical winds, heavy rains or hail, and lightning, which interact with trees from the canopy down to the soil.
“Storms account for over half of the forest mortality in the Amazon,” said Yanlei Feng, first author on the paper. “Climate change has a lot of impact on Amazon forests, but so far, a large fraction of the research focus has been on drought and fire. We hope our research brings more attention to extreme storms and improves our models to work under a changing environment from climate change.”
Researchers mapped more than 1,000 major windthrow events from 1990-2019. Each of these large blowdowns covered more than 25,000 square meters. By comparing the locations of windthrows with data about atmospheric conditions, researchers found a relationship that can be incorporated into future climate models. Credit: Robinson I. Negrón-Juárez and Yanlei Feng.
While this study looked at a future with high carbon emissions (a scenario known as SSP-585), scientists could use projected CAPE data to explore windthrow impacts in different emissions scenarios. Researchers are now working to integrate the new forest-storm relationship into Earth system models. Better models will help scientists explore how forests will respond to a warmer future – and whether they can continue to siphon carbon out of the atmosphere or will instead become a contributor.
“This was a very impactful climate change study for me,” said Feng, who completed the research as a graduate student researcher in the NGEE-Tropics project at Berkeley Lab. She now studies carbon capture and storage at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. “I’m worried about the projected increase in forest disturbances in our study and I hope I can help limit climate change. So now I’m working on climate change solutions.”
NGEE-Tropics is a ten-year, multi-institutional project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research.
In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
Scanning transmission electron microscope images reveal the elemental distribution in a “disordered” solid electrolyte: Top row: titanium (Ti), zirconium (Zr), and tin (Sn); bottom row: hafnium (Hf), phosphorus (P), and oxygen (O). Scale bar: 50 nanometers. (Credit: Yan Zeng and Gerd Ceder/Berkeley Lab) 
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