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Teams of Scientists Gather at Berkeley Lab to Study Secrets of Plants’ Plumbing

Photo - Thorsten Knipfer, a UC Davis postdoctoral researcher, carries an American chestnut sapling into the experimental chamber at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source. Knipfer and other researchers used X-rays at ALS Beamline 8.3.2 to scan the stems of dozens of saplings. The work will produce 3-D reconstructions of the stems’ microscopic structure. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab)

Accelerator Operator Stitches Together Storied Career at Bevatron, Cyclotron

Photo - Reba Siero, an accelerator operator, in the control room of Berkeley Lab’s 88-Inch Cyclotron. (Credit: Paul Mueller/Berkeley Lab)

Researchers Peel Back Another Layer of Chemistry with ‘Tender’ X-rays

Photo - Berkeley Lab's Ethan Crumlin, working with other researchers, found a new way to study chemical processes at work in batteries and in other chemical reactions using a specialized X-ray toolkit developed at the lab's Advanced Light Source, an X-ray source. The technique was pioneered at the ALS's Beam Line 9.3.1. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab)

Researchers Gear Up Galaxy-seeking Robots for a Test Run

Photo - Parker Fagrelius inspects ProtoDESI, a prototype system for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. ProtoDESI will be tested at the Mayall Telescope in Arizona in August and September. (Paul Mueller/Berkeley Lab)

Hunting for Dark Matter’s ‘Hidden Valley’

Photo - Kathryn Zurek (Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt/Berkeley Lab)

3 Knowns and 3 Unknowns about Dark Matter

Image - A composite image of the "bullet cluster," a galaxy cluster formed by a collision of two clusters. The pink clumps show hot gas containing most of the normal matter, while the two blue clumps reveal where most of the mass in the clusters is actually contained. This provides evidence for dark matter since most of the mass was expected to be concentrated around the pink areas. (Credit: X-ray image by NASA/CXC/M.Markevitch et al.; optical image by NASA/STScI, Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.; lensing map image by NASA/STScI, ESO WFI, Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.)

$40M to Establish New Observatory Probing Early Universe

Photo - The Simons Array will be located in Chile's High Atacama Desert, at an elevation of about 17,000 feet. The site currently hosts the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (bowl-shaped structure at upper right) and the Simons Array (the three telescopes at the bottom left, middle and right). The Simons Observatory will incorporate several new telescopes and set the stage for a next-generation experiment. (University of Pennsylvania)

Scientists Take a Major Leap Toward a ‘Perfect’ Quantum Metamaterial

Illustration - The wavelike pattern at the top shows the accordion-like structure of a proposed quantum material—an artificial crystal made of light—that can trap atoms in regularly spaced nanoscale pockets. These pockets can be made to hold a large collection of ultracold “host” atoms (green), slowed to a standstill by laser light, and individually planted “probe” atoms (red) that can be made to transmit quantum information in the form of a photon (particle of light). The lower panel shows how the artificial crystal can be reconfigured with light from an open (hyperbolic) geometry to a closed (elliptical) geometry, which greatly affects the speed at which the probe atom can release a photon. (Credit: Pankaj K. Jha/UC Berkeley)

Berkeley Lab Scientists Part of New Particle-hunting Season at CERN’s LHC

Image - A computerized representation of a proton-proton collision taken in the ALICE detector during the latest commissioning phase of CERN'S LHC, with low-intensity beams. (Credit: CERN)

Seeing Atoms and Molecules in Action with an Electron ‘Eye’

Rendering - The layout of the HiRES ultrafast electron diffraction beamline, which is located in the domed Advanced Light Source building at Berkeley Lab. (Computerized rendering courtesy of Daniele Filippetto/Berkeley Lab)

Revealing the Fluctuations of Flexible DNA in 3-D

Illustration: In a Berkeley Lab-led study, flexible double-helix DNA segments connected to gold nanoparticles are revealed from the 3-D density maps (purple and yellow) reconstructed from individual samples using a Berkeley Lab-developed technique called individual-particle electron tomography or IPET. Projections of the structures are shown in the background grid. (Credit: Berkeley Lab)

New Fuel Cell Design Powered by Graphene-wrapped Nanocrystals

Photo - A powdery mixture of graphene-wrapped magnesium nanocrystals, produced at Berkeley Lab, is stable in air. The mixture's energy properties show promise for use in hydrogen fuel cells. (Eun Seon Cho/Berkeley Lab)