LANL
LANL pulsed magnet smashes the 100 Tesla magnetic pulse barrier
Round performance numbers aren't necessarily important milestones, but they do exude an undeniable aura of accomplishment. This was the case when researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) used their largest pulsed magnet to crack the 100 Tesla mark (roughly 2 million times larger than the Earth's magnetic field) by generating a 100.75 Tesla magnetic pulse without damaging the magnet. Read More
While rooftops are the obvious place to put solar cells to generate clean electricity for the home, we’ve seen a number of technologies aimed at expanding the potential solar collecting area to include windows using transparent solar cells. These include Octillion Corp’s NanoPower Window technology, RSi’s semi-transparent photovoltaic glass windows, and EnSol’s transparent thin film. In this latest development, U.S. scientists have fabricated a new type of self-assembling transparent thin film material that could boost the cost effectiveness and scalability of solar window production. Read More
One of the key challenges when designing nuclear reactors is finding materials that can withstand the massive temperatures, radiation, physical stress and corrosive conditions of these extreme environments. Exposure to high radiation alone produces significant damage at the nanoscale, so scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, have been working on a mechanism that allows nanocrystalline materials to heal themselves after suffering radiation-induced damage. This gives hope for materials that will improve the reliability, safety and lifespan of nuclear energy systems. Read More
Scientists have for some time postulated that "dark matter" could partially account for evidence of missing mass in the universe, while the hypothetical form of energy known as "dark energy" is the most popular way to explain recent observations that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate and accounts for 74 percent of the total mass-energy of the universe according to the standard model of cosmology. To better understand these two mysterious cosmic constituents scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are using Roadrunner, the world’s fastest supercomputer, to model one of the largest simulations of the distribution of matter in the universe. Read More
June 17, 2008 A collaboration between IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory has resulted in the world's fastest supercomputer. Roadrunner can run at speeds above the "petaflop barrier" of 1,000 trillion operations per second, making it twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene/L™ and opening up an era of science at a previously unseen scale. Read More
