An international research team has tracked down and measured an elusive molecule that rapidly breaks down pollution in the atmosphere, turning it into clouds that actually help cool the Earth.

Read the Press Release

Read the Full Article

Sandia combustion researchers Craig Taatjes, left, and David Osborn discuss data found from the detection and measurement of Criegee intermediate reactions. The apparatus was used to make the measurements, which researchers believe will substantially impact existing atmospheric chemistry. Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories.

Structural studies at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source could point to reduced carbon emissions and stronger cements.

Read the News Release

At Calipso, the California High-Pressure Science Observatory at beamline 12.2.2 of the Advanced Light Source, materials can be squeezed to tremendous pressures in diamond anvil cells, where they are trapped between the two diamonds in a small central chamber. The x-rays from the beamline pass through the diamonds and the sample, throwing diffraction patterns on a CCD detector that reveal the material’s structure. (Signals from diamond and corundum in the anvil cell mechanism must be subtracted from the diffraction patterns.) (Beamline photo by Roy Kaltschmidt)

Berkeley Lab and industry co-invest in new high-tech facilities and tools at the Advanced Light Source.

Read the News Release

The MET5 microlithography tool at the Advanced Light Source’s beamline 12.0.1 will be housed in an enclosure inside a new clean room with wafer-processing facilities immediately adjacent, built by Berkeley Lab. The MET5 tool, funded by industry, incorporates a state-of-the-art, 8-nanometer optic.

Unique superconducting bend magnets or "superbends" were designed and installed in the Advanced Light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory without compromise to performance within the existing photon storage ring.

Read the Story

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have partnered with colleagues at leading semiconductor manufacturers to create the world’s most advanced extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) microscope.

Read the Full Article

Kenneth Goldberg is seen in the reflective coating of a photolithography mask, contained in the clear plastic box, which he’s about to measure at the Advanced Light Source’s beamline 11.3.2. Inset at lower right shows a mask’s extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) absorbing layer, printed on a six-inch square of glass coated with multiple layers of molybdenum and silicon only billionths of a meter thick to reflect unwanted EUV. The patterned layer represents one level of a working microprocessor or memory chip, which may have 20 or more such levels. Its structures are less than one ten-millionth of a meter across and diffract visible light in rainbow patterns.

Berkeley Lab Researchers Show How Loss of Bone Quality Also a Major Factor

Read the News Release

At each size scale, the hierarchical structure of human cortical bone influences its susceptibility to fracturing with smaller levels affecting intrinsic toughness and higher levelss impacting extrinsic toughness. (Image courtesy of Ritchie, et. al)

Ability to Probe Deep Below Material Surfaces Should Be Boon for Nanoscale Devices.

Read the News Release

Alexander Gray (left) and Charles Fadley at Beamline 9.3.1 of Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source where they will soon be able to carry out their hard x-ray angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (HARPES) experiments. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab)

Powerful X-Rays Enable Development of Successful Treatment for Melanoma and Other Life-Threatening Diseases.

Read the Full Article

The new anti-cancer drug, vemurafenib, is the green honeycomb structure at middle left. Four dotted red lines show where it attaches to a target area in the mutated enzyme, disabling it from promoting the growth of tumors. | Image courtesy of Plexxikon Inc.

With the Advanced Light Source Berkeley Lab scientists explore the electronic structure of graphene in regions never before tested by experiment.

Read the News Feature

Undoped graphene isn’t a metal, semiconductor, or insulator but a semimetal, whose unusual properties include electron-electron interactions between particles widely separated on graphene’s honeycomb lattice - here suggested by an artist’s impression of Feynman diagrams of such interactions. Long-range interactions, unlike those that occur only over very short distances in ordinary metals, alter the fundamental character of charge carriers in graphene. (Image by Caitlin Youngquist, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs)

Scientists have deciphered the structure of an essential part of Mediator, a complex molecular machine that plays a vital role in regulating the transcription of DNA.

Read the News Article

Scientists have deciphered the structure of an essential part of Mediator, a complex molecular machine that plays a vital role in regulating the transcription of DNA. (Credit: Indiana University School of Medicine)

Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers.

Read the Full Article

In magnetic contrast images (top) taken by the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the bright spots are nanomagnets with their north ends pointing down (represented by red bar below) and the dark spots are north-up nanomagnets (blue). The six nanomagnets form a majority logic gate transistor, where the output on the right of the center bar is determined by the majority of three inputs on the top, left and bottom. Horizontal neighboring magnets tend to point in alternate directions, while vertical neighbors prefer to point in the same direction. (Image: Jeffrey Bokor lab, UC Berkeley)

Whether the abundant atmospheric specie malonic acid stays in a stable keto form or twists into a highly active enol form depends on the amount of water it finds in the atmosphere, according to researchers at the University of Iowa and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Read the Full Article

An abundant atmospheric species, malonic acid transforms from the stable, nonreactive keto form to the highly reactive enol form at elevated relative humidity. The reactive enol form is 4 to 5 orders of magnitude more abundant in the atmosphere than was expected from aqueous chemistry.

Carbonaceous chondrites are a type of organic-rich meteorite that contain samples of the materials that took part in the creation of our planets nearly 4.6 billion years ago, including materials that were likely formed before our Solar System was created and may have been crucial to the formation of life on Earth.

Read the News Release

The book Fundamentals and Applications of Aerosol Spectroscopy, recently published by Taylor and Francis Books, Inc., boasts two chapters in the "UV, X-Ray, and Electron Beam Studies" section written by Berkeley Lab researchers, highlighting a significant amount of work completed at ALS Beamlines 11.0.2, 5.3.2, and 9.0.2.

Forget the magnets on your fridge. How about a magnet in your fridge, one that keeps your leftover pizza cold while consuming less energy than today’s refrigerators?

It could happen. But don’t expect to buy an energy-saving magnetic fridge at Home Depot tomorrow, or even in five years. Scientists must first gain a better understanding of a phenomenon called the giant magnetocaloric effect, in which a changing magnetic field in a material causes its temperature to drop precipitously.

Berkeley Lab's Sujoy Roy has spent the last few years uncovering the secrets of the phenomenon by studying alloys that experience a pronounced magnetocaloric effect. He uses Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, a national user facility that generates light brighter than the sun to probe the fundamental properties of substances, down to the atomic level. Read the full article.