Studying Einstein’s General Relativity theory and such celestial phenomena as black holes and strange attractors in a laboratory setting may soon be possible using the new breed of artificial optical materials that can bend light in unusual ways.

The electron mobility and other unique features of graphene hold great promise for nanoscale electronics and photonics, but graphene has no bandgap. Now Berkeley Lab researchers have engineered a bandgap in bilayer graphene that can be precisely controlled from 0 to .25 electron volts at room temperature, making possible new kinds of nanotransistors and nanoscale optical devices in the infrared range.

The Nearby Supernova Factory has discovered an efficient method for standardizing the intrinsic brightness and thus the distance to the cosmic milestones known as Type Ia supernovae. The discovery underlines the crucial importance of spectroscopy in the quest to understand dark energy.

Berkeley Lab’s interest in the Planck mission to map the cosmic microwave background goes back to a proposal that evolved into the present design – and extends into the future as NERSC’s powerful computers stand by to analyze the coming flood of data.

Berkeley Lab scientists have developed a powerful new kind of sputter process for the electronics industry—and other, more exotic applications, including outer space—which deposits high-quality metal films in complex, three-dimensional nanoscale patterns at a rate that by one important measure is orders of magnitude greater than most existing systems.

President-elect Barack Obama has nominated Steve Chu, Director of Berkeley Lab, to be Secretary of Energy. Chu is a Nobel laureate physicist and a Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. He is also one of the nation’s foremost and outspoken advocates for scientific solutions to the twin problems of global warming and the need for carbon-neutral renewable sources of energy.

Until the fall of 2008, the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) was a competition among satellite proposals named SNAP, DESTINY, and ADEPT. Now all will be combined in a spacecraft built by NASA, with help from the U.S. Department of Energy. DOE’s JDEM Project Office is headquartered at Berkeley Lab.

From COBE to Planck and beyond, the volume of data from measurements of the cosmic microwave background continues to grow by orders of magnitude. The Computational Cosmology Center, a collaboration between Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division and Computational Research Division, has algorithms and implementations in the works so NERSC’s supercomputers can handle the rising tide.

In work for the next-generation FERMI@Elettra free electron laser facility in Trieste, Berkeley Lab accelerator scientists and engineers are applying their unique expertise to devising timing and synchronization systems that will keep far-flung components in step to within a few quadrillionths of a second.