National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS II)

Capturing Ghosts

2026/02/182026/02/26

Quantum “ghost imaging” technique paves the way for nanoscale-resolution images at a lower X-ray dose.

A group of researchers led by scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, is exploring a quantum-inspired imaging approach that could set the stage for obtaining high-resolution data while reducing X-ray exposure. The method relies on pairs of quantum-entangled X-ray photons, linked particles of light from the same origin that share properties and information. In each entangled pair, one photon interacts with a sample while its partner does not. By analyzing these pairs, the team demonstrated that information carried by the untouched photon can be used to form an image, complementing information obtained from its partner. This early proof of concept could ultimately enable longer, lower-dose studies of delicate biological materials, such as plant tissues, and may one day inform lower-dose medical imaging. Their results were published in Optica.

Seeing “ghosts”

Quantum “ghost” imaging is a technique that is as intriguing as its name suggests. In conventional X-ray imaging, X-ray photons directly interact with the sample being studied. Ghost imaging, instead, uses pairs of photons that are created together and share linked properties, known as quantum correlations. One photon from each pair travels through the sample, while its partner never interacts with it at all. Despite this, the untouched photon behaves as if it has encountered the sample.

Read more on the BNL website

Image: A conceptual schematic of “ghost imaging” displays the samples being imaged, which include a cat-shaped tungsten test pattern and an E. cardamomum seed. The objects are placed inside a ring on the lower two detector chips, while the upper chips are left open. By measuring paired X-ray signals at the same time, the system produces two matching images.

Credit: Valerie A. Lentz/Brookhaven National Laboratory

Novel AI Method Sharpens 3D X-ray Vision

2026/01/122026/01/29

NSLS-II scientists see around hidden corners of tiny objects, even when significant portions of data are missing

X-ray tomography is a powerful tool that enables scientists and engineers to peer inside of objects in 3D, including computer chips and advanced battery materials, without performing anything invasive. It’s the same basic method behind medical CT scans. Scientists or technicians capture X-ray images as an object is rotated, and then advanced software mathematically reconstructs the object’s 3D internal structure. But imaging fine details on the nanoscale, like features on a microchip, requires a much higher spatial resolution than a typical medical CT scan — about 10,000 times higher.

The Hard X-ray Nanoprobe (HXN) beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, is able to achieve that kind of resolution with X-rays that are more than a billion times brighter than traditional CT scans.

Tomography only works well when these projection images can be taken from all angles. In many real-world cases, however, that’s impossible. For example, scientists can’t spin a flat computer chip around 180 degrees without blocking some of the X-rays. When parallel to the surface at high angles, fewer X-rays can penetrate the chip, limiting the viewing angles of the measurement. The missing data from this angular range produces a “blind spot,” leading the reconstruction software to produce blurry, distorted images.

“We call this the ‘missing wedge’ problem,” said Hanfei Yan, lead beamline scientist at the HXN beamline and corresponding author of this work. “For decades, this problem has limited the applications of X-ray and electron tomography in many areas of science and technology.”

Read more on the BNL website

Image: This 3D image of an integrated circuit showing slices through its thickness was reconstructed with a new technique that incorporates artificial intelligence called the “perception fused iterative tomography reconstruction engine.”

Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Orbital-Driven Frustrated Electron Hopping in a 2D Lattice

2025/10/162025/11/06

Scientists show that Pd5AlI2 can mimic the electronic behavior of frustrated lattices, creating both flat and Dirac-like bands from a simple square lattice.

This work reveals a new way to achieve the exotic electronic properties of frustrated lattices in simple, stable materials, opening paths to discover and design novel quantum materials.

Electron hopping on periodic lattice structures leads to unusual electronic behavior. In particular, hopping on two-dimensional frustrated lattices such as kagome, dice, and Lieb creates band structures that include both massless, Dirac-like bands and flat ( dispersionless) bands. Since real materials with dice and Lieb lattices are rare and their experimental realization has so far been limited to optical lattices of ultracold atoms, researchers have proposed another approach: using the arrangement of atomic orbitals to reproduce the same frustrated hopping seen in these lattices. This method could expand the range of materials that show frustrated electron hopping, though it has not yet been demonstrated in practice.

Read more on the NSLS-II website

Image: a) Orbital orientation of PdAl layer in Pd5AlI2 forms a checkerboard lattice. (b & c) ARPES Fermi surface map and band structure (blue) along the

path (inset; red) of the surface BZ. DFT calculated band structure is overlaid on top (dashed grey) with bands linked to the decorated checkerboard model highlighted in cyan and red.

A VISION for an AI Lab Partner

2025/06/262025/06/27

Brookhaven Lab team pioneers interactive virtual companion to accelerate discoveries at scientific user facilities

UPTON, N.Y. — A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have dreamed up, developed, and tested a novel voice-controlled artificial intelligence (AI) assistant designed to break down everyday barriers for busy scientists.

Known as the Virtual Scientific Companion, or VISION, the generative AI tool – developed by researchers at the Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) with support from experts at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) — offers an opportunity to bridge knowledge gaps at complex instruments, carry out more efficient experiments, save scientists’ time, and overall, accelerate scientific discovery.

The idea is that a user simply has to tell VISION in plain language what they’d like to do at an instrument and the AI companion, tailored to that instrument, will take on the task — whether it’s running an experiment, launching data analysis, or visualizing results. The Brookhaven team recently shared details about VISION in a paper published in Machine Learning: Science and Technology.

“I’m really excited about how AI can impact science and it’s something we as the scientific community should definitely explore,” said Esther Tsai, a scientist in the AI-Accelerated Nanoscience group at CFN. “What we can’t deny is that brilliant scientists spend a lot of time on routine work. VISION acts as an assistant that scientists and users can talk to for answers to basic questions about the instrument capability and operation.”

VISION highlights the close partnership between CFN and NSLS-II, two DOE Office of Science user facilities at Brookhaven Lab. Together they collaborate with facility users on the setup, scientific planning, and analysis of data from experiments at three NSLS-II beamlines, highly specialized measurement tools that enable researchers to explore the structure of materials using beams of X-rays.

Tsai, inspired to alleviate bottlenecks that come with using NSLS-II’s in-demand beamlines, received a DOE Early Career Award in 2023 to develop this new concept. Tsai now leads the CFN team behind VISION, which has collaborated with NSLS-II beamline scientists to launch and test the system at the Complex Materials Scattering (CMS) beamline at NSLS-II, demonstrating the first voice-controlled experiment at an X-ray scattering beamline and marking progress towards the world of AI-augmented discovery.

“At Brookhaven Lab, we’re not only leading in researching this frontier scientific virtual companion concept, we’re also being hands-on, deploying this AI technique on the experimental floor at NSLS-II and exploring how it can be useful to users,” Tsai said.

Talking to AI for flexible workflows

VISION leverages the growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the technology at the heart of popular AI assistants such as ChatGPT.

An LLM is an expansive program that creates text modeled on natural human language. VISION exploits this concept, not just to generate text for answering questions but also to generate decisions about what to do and computer code to drive an instrument. Internally, VISION is organized into multiple “cognitive blocks,” or cogs, each comprising an LLM that handles a specific task. Multiple cogs can be put together to form a capable assistant, with the cogs carrying out work transparently for the scientist.

“A user can just go to the beamline and say, ‘I want to select certain detectors’ or ‘I want to take a measurement every minute for five seconds’ or ‘I want to increase the temperature’ and VISION will translate that command into code,” Tsai said.

Those examples of natural language inputs, whether speech, text, or both, are first fed to VISION’s “classifier” cog, which decides what type of task the user is asking about. The classifier routes to the right cog for the task, such as an “operator” cog for instrument control or “analyst” cog for data analysis.

Then, in just a few seconds, the system translates the input into code that’s passed back to the beamline workstation, which the user can review before executing. On the back end, everything is being run on “HAL,” a CFN server optimized for running AI workloads on graphics processing units.

Read more on BNL website

Image: VISION aims to lead the natural-language-controlled scientific expedition with joint human-AI force for accelerated scientific discovery at user facilities.

Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Scientists Use AI and X-ray Vision to Gain Insight into Battery Electrolyte

2025/05/222025/05/22

Artificial intelligence and experimental validation reveal atomic-scale basis for improved ‘water-in-salt’ battery performance

UPTON, N.Y. — A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University (SBU) used artificial intelligence (AI) to help them understand how zinc-ion batteries work — and potentially how to make them more efficient for future energy storage needs. Their study, published in the journal PRX Energy, focused on the water-based electrolyte that shuttles electrically charged zinc ions through the rechargeable battery during charging and use. The AI model tapped into how those charged ions interact with water under varying concentrations of zinc chloride (ZnCl₂), a form of salt with high solubility in water.

The AI findings, validated by experiments at Brookhaven Lab’s National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), show why high salt concentrations produce the best battery performance.

“AI is an important tool that can facilitate the advancement of science,” said Esther Takeuchi, chair of the Interdisciplinary Science Department (ISD) at Brookhaven Lab and the William and Jane Knapp Chair in Energy and the Environment at SBU. “The research done by this team provides an example of the insights that can be gained by combining experiment and theory enhanced by the use of AI.”

Amy Marschilok, manager of the Energy Storage Division of ISD and a professor of chemistry at SBU, added, “This work could help advance the development of robust zinc-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage. These batteries are particularly attractive for resilient energy applications because the water-based electrolyte is inherently safe and the materials use to make them are abundant and affordable.”

Water in salt

Like all batteries, zinc-ion batteries convert energy from chemical reactions into electrical energy, explained Deyu Lu, a staff scientist in the Theory and Computation Group of Brookhaven Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) who led this research.

“However, competing chemical reactions, such as those that split water molecules and produce hydrogen gas, can severely degrade battery performance,” he said. “If any of this energy is used in side reactions, you lose energy that is supposed to do work.”

Lu and his collaborators knew that previous studies had found that water splitting is suppressed in a special zinc chloride electrolyte where the salt concentration is so high it’s referred to as “water-in-salt,” in contrast to more common “salt-in-water” electrolytes. To figure out why the high-salt version was better, they wanted to capture the atomic-scale details of how zinc and chloride ions move and interact with water — and how that affects the electrolyte’s conductivity — at different salt concentrations.

But seeing these atomic-scale details is extremely challenging. So the team turned to a form of computer modeling enhanced by AI vision.

Developing AI vision

“Seeing these complex details would be impossible using conventional computing techniques,” Lu said. “Conventional simulation methods cannot handle the large number of atomic interactions with the desired accuracy to capture the timescales over which such systems evolve. Such calculations require enormous computing power, which would easily take many years.”

So instead of performing all the complex calculations that would be needed to fully simulate the ions’ interactions with water, the team used conventional simulations to generate a small number of simulation data, known as a “training set,” and fed it to an AI program. They used computing resources at the Theory and Computational Facility at CFN, a DOE Office of Science user facility, and Brookhaven Lab’s Scientific Computing and Data Facilities within the Computing and Data Sciences directorate (CDS).

“We needed a little bit of data collected by calculating a small number of interactions to kickstart the process of training an initial model,” said CDS’s Chuntian Cao, first author on the paper. “Then, we ran the model to generate more data to continue to improve the model’s predictions.”

At each step, the scientists ran their results through an ensemble of machine learning (ML) models to assess whether the predictions were accurate. Lu likened the process to calling several friends to help answer questions on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” a once-popular TV game show. “If the friends/models all agree, then it looks like you have good chance that you have an accurate prediction,” he noted.

But, as Cao pointed out, “When we find that some predictions have very large deviations in the ensemble of ML models, we return to doing the conventional calculations to get the correct answer. These new corrected data points are then added back to the training data to further refine the ML model.”

This iterative “active learning” process minimized the number of calculations that needed to be run in a computationally expensive way to complete the training of the ML model. And, after several rounds of training, the AI model could make predictions about much larger numbers of atomic interactions over longer and longer timescales.

“Chuntian ran the simulations with several thousands of atoms, a very large system, for hundreds of nanoseconds — an impossible task using the conventional methods. AI/ML is truly a game changer in the study of complex materials,” Lu said.

Stablizing water

The Brookhaven and Stony Brook scientists’ AI model revealed that high zinc chloride concentrations play the key role in stabilizing water molecules, protecting them from splitting.

In pure water, the oxygen atom in one water molecule (H₂O) forms two so-called hydrogen bonds with hydrogen atoms in neighboring water molecules. These hydrogen bonds connect the water moleclues in a continuous network that makes the water molecules more reactive and susceptible to splitting, Lu said.

The team found that the number of hydrogen bonds drops rapidly as the zinc chloride concentration increases, disrupting the hydrogen-bond network. In the water-in-salt regime, only about 20% of the hydrogen bonds are left.

“Stabilizing the water molecules is an essential component of why high-concentration water-in-salt electrolytes work so well,” said Cao.

Scientists Reveal Hidden Interface in Superconducting Qubit Material

2025/05/052025/05/07

The metal-substrate interface determines atomic structure and could affect qubit performance

UPTON, N.Y. — Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have uncovered an unexpected interface layer that may be hindering the performance of superconducting qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers. While examining this layer through a combination of imaging techniques and theoretical models, they discovered the underlying cause of puzzling structural differences in qubits.

The unexpected layer is called a metal-substrate interface, or M-S interface, because it lies between a layer of tantalum metal and a sapphire substrate. Researchers from the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C²QA), a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Brookhaven Lab, have fabricated high-performing superconducting qubits made up of a tantalum thin film deposited on a sapphire substrate. But to unlock the potential power of quantum computers, qubits must exhibit a higher “coherence time,” meaning they need to retain quantum information for longer.

Quantum researchers have dedicated significant efforts to determining which constituent materials and fabrication techniques yield qubits with the highest coherence times. But there are several other elements of qubit architecture that could also affect coherence times. For example, when a qubit is exposed to air, the surface-level tantalum reacts with oxygen. This results in a tantalum oxide layer on the surface of the qubit, and C²QA researchers have found that the interface between this oxide layer and the tantalum thin film hinders the qubit performance. They’ve even explored coating tantalum to prevent the oxidation from occurring.

“We knew that the interface between tantalum oxide and tantalum had a pretty big effect on the performance of qubits made with tantalum thin films,” explained Aswin kumar Anbalagan, a researcher at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) and first author on the recent Advanced Science publication. “That led us to question whether the other interface, the one between the tantalum and the sapphire, was also affecting qubit performance.”

Thinner samples, deeper insights: probing the M-S interface

The high-performing superconducting qubits fabricated by C²QA researchers are typically between 150 and 200 nanometers thick. Though they are incredibly thin — for context, a human hair is 80,000-100,000 nanometers wide — they are too thick to characterize with certain X-ray techniques.

Anbalagan and his mentors at NSLS-II wanted to explore the region where the tantalum metal meets the sapphire substrate, so they partnered with researchers from the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) to fabricate thinner samples — around 30 nanometers thick — made from the same materials as traditional qubits.

“At CFN, we have developed a technique to fabricate high-quality tantalum thin films for quantum circuitry applications,” said Mingzhao Liu, senior scientist at CFN and co-author on the paper. “In this case, we adopted the same technique to fabricate tantalum films that are much thinner, with a very smooth surface and interface against sapphire.” NSLS-II and CFN are DOE Office of Science user facilities at Brookhaven Lab.

“We started with some reasonably straightforward measurements at NSLS-II to see the interface below the tantalum thin film,” said Andrew L. Walter, a lead beamline scientist in NSLS-II’s electronic structure techniques program and one of the lead authors on the paper.

The researchers conducted X-ray reflectivity experiments at the Beamline for Materials Measurement (BMM). These studies offered insights into the thickness and density of each layer in the sample. They also leveraged the Spectroscopy Soft and Tender 2 (SST-2) beamline to take X-ray spectroscopy measurements that revealed the chemical makeup of the layers. The BMM and SST-2 beamlines at NSLS-II are funded and operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Read more on BNL website

Image: Brookhaven Lab researchers discovered an unexpected interface layer between a tantalum (Ta) thin film and the sapphire substrate it was grown on. To better understand this metal-substrate interface, the team conducted several techniques, like scanning transmission electron microscopy (top right circle), and collaborated with researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who carried out computational simulations (bottom right circle). This research, conducted as part of the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, revealed that the concentration of oxygen atoms (O) at the sapphire’s surface influences the direction of tantalum’s deposition. Aluminum (Al) is a core component of sapphire, in addition to oxygen.

Credit: Nathan Johnson | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

DNA Helps Electronics to Leave Flatland

2025/04/022025/04/02

Editor’s note: The following press release, originally issued by Columbia Engineering, describes a new technique that uses DNA to direct the assembly of electronic devices. This work leveraged two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facilities at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory — the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) and the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II). At CFN, researchers used the Materials Synthesis and Characterization and Electron Microscopy facilities to fabricate and study these novel devices. Using the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe (HXN) beamline at NSLS-II, researchers characterized the devices’ nanoscale structure. This research was led by Oleg Gang, leader of the Soft and Bio Nanomaterials Group at CFN and professor at Columbia Engineering. For more information on Brookhaven’s involvement, contact Danielle Roedel (droedel@bnl.gov, 631-344-2347) or Peter Genzer (genzer@bnl.gov, 631-344-3174).

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have for the first time used DNA to help create 3D electronically operational devices with nanometer-size features.

“Going from 2D to 3D can dramatically increase the density and computing power of electronics,” said corresponding author Oleg Gang, professor of chemical engineering and of applied physics and materials science at Columbia Engineering and leader of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials’ Soft and Bio Nanomaterials Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The new manufacturing technique could also contribute to the ongoing effort to develop AI systems that are directly inspired by natural intelligence.

“3D electronic architectures that imitate the natural 3D structure of the brain may prove enormously more effective at running brain-mimicking artificial intelligence systems than existing 2D architectures,” Gang said. The researchers detailed their findings March 28 in the journal Science Advances.

From etching to folding

Conventional electronics rely on flat circuitry. To help microchips grow more powerful, researchers worldwide are experimenting with approaches to building them in three dimensions.

However, current electronics manufacturing techniques are top-down in nature — a piece of material is gradually eroded, for example, by an electron beam, until the desired structure is achieved, like sculpting a block of stone. These methods have encountered problems fabricating 3D devices when it comes to creating complex structures and doing so in a cost-effective manner. For instance, they face challenges in assembling multiple layers of circuitry that stack up properly. “Over the course of hundreds of steps during production, errors accumulate that are prohibitive from the point of view of performance and cost,” Gang said.

A conceptually different way to build a 3D system is from the bottom up, where many components self-assemble into complex structures. Now Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a new biologically inspired bottom-up way for 3D electronics to build themselves. The key behind the new technique is the way in which strands of DNA can fold themselves into shapes — so-called origami. These building blocks, called frames, are then used to assemble large-scale 3D structures, called frameworks, with nanoscale precision.

DNA is made of strings of four different kinds of molecules, known by the letters A, T, C and G. These stick to each other in highly specific ways — A to T, and C to G. By designing multiple molecules with the right sequences, researchers can get long DNA strands to fold themselves into 2D or 3D shapes. Snippets of DNA stapled onto these strands then hold the folded designs in place.

Read more on NSLS-II website

Image: Chip-integrated 3D nanostructured device fabricated using DNA self-assembly (Left panel). A DNA crystal is grown at a designated substrate location (about 1000 crystals on 5μm pads are shown on a Right panel), then mineralized to silica and volumetrically templated with a semiconductor material before electrodes are attached (Center panel). The resulting device exhibits an electrical response when exposed to light. Thousands of such 3D devices can be grown in parallel using this bottom-up fabrication approach.

Credit: Center for Functional Nanomaterials

Why Your Headphone Battery Doesn’t Last

2025/02/052025/02/10

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally issued by the University of Texas at Austin. The research team performed nano-diffraction measurements on battery particles extracted from a commercial wireless earbud at the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe (HXN) at the National Synchrotron Light Source II, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Their findings indicate that there are tiny, coexisting regions within the battery that behave differently. These regions show signs of changing phases, which adds to the bigger picture of how the material behaves across different parts of the battery cell. For more information on Brookhaven’s role in this research, contact Denise Yazak (dyazak@bnl.gov, 631-344-6371).

AUSTIN, Texas — Ever notice that batteries in electronics don’t last as long as they did when they were brand new?

An international research team led by The University of Texas at Austin took on this well-known battery challenge, called degradation, with a twist. They’re focusing their work on real-world technology that many of us use daily: wireless earbuds. They deployed X-ray, infrared and other imaging technologies to understand the complexities of all the technology packed in these tiny devices and learn why their battery lives erode over time.

“This started with my personal headphones. I only wear the right one, and I found that after two years, the left earbud had a much longer battery life,” said Yijin Liu, an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, who led the new research published in Advanced Materials. “So, we decided to look into it and see what we could find.”

They found that other critical components in the compact device, like the Bluetooth antenna, microphones and circuits, clashed with the battery, creating a challenging microenvironment. This dynamic led to a temperature gradient — different temperatures at the top and bottom portions of the battery — that damaged the battery.

Exposure to the real world, with many different temperatures, degrees of air quality and other wildcard factors, also plays a role. Batteries are often designed to withstand harsh environments, but frequent environmental changes are challenging in their own way.

These findings, the researchers say, illustrate the need to think more about how batteries fit into real-world devices such as phones, laptops and vehicles. How can they be packaged to mitigate interactions with potentially damaging components, and how can they be adjusted for different user behaviors?

Read more on BNL website

Artificial Imagination

2025/01/162025/01/17

A Brookhaven Lab researcher has conceptualized an “exocortex,” an extension of the human brain that will generate inspiration and imagination for scientific discovery

PTON, N.Y. — Artificial intelligence (AI) once seemed like a fantastical construct of science fiction, enabling characters to deploy spacecrafts to neighboring galaxies with a casual command. Humanoid AIs even served as companions to otherwise lonely characters. Now, in the very real 21^st century, AI is becoming part of everyday life, with tools like chatbots available and useful for everyday tasks like answering questions, improving writing, and solving mathematical equations.

AI does, however, have the potential to revolutionize scientific research — in ways that can feel like science fiction but are within reach.

At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists are already using AI to automate experiments and discover new materials. They’re even designing an AI scientific companion that communicates in ordinary language and helps conduct experiments. And Kevin Yager, the Electronic Nanomaterials Group leader at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), has articulated an overarching vision for the role of AI in scientific research.

It’s called a science exocortex — “exo” meaning outside and “cortex” referencing the information processing layer of the human brain. Rather than simple chatbots and scientific assistants, the conceptualized exocortex will be an extension of a scientist’s brain. Researchers will interact with it through conversation, without the need for any invasive brain-computer interfaces.

“An exocortex, realized through software, would serve as a new source of thinking, inspiration, and imagination,” said Yager, whose vision was recently published in Digital Discovery. “If we design and build the exocortex correctly, our interactions with it will feel like those ‘aha’ moments we sometimes have upon waking from sleep or while otherwise ruminating on a problem. You won’t check in with an exocortex; you’ll experience it.”

Yager describes the exocortex as analogous to the layers of the human brain, which developed through the course of human evolution. Over millions of years, the human brain became the information processing masterpiece it is today by accumulating new layers, each one more sophisticated than the last. The bottom of the brain controls basic survival functions, like breathing. Other, more advanced layers tackle increasingly complicated functions, like emotional regulation and language processing. Most importantly, all facets of the brain work together in harmony to form “the human experience.”

“Technologically, we have the potential now to add another, external layer to the brain — one that connects us to AI,” Yager said. “And just like the specialized regions of the brain that coordinate with each other to give emergence to what we call intelligence, the exocortex will integrate individualized AI capabilities to solve a problem or generate creativity.”

An “app store” of AI agents

Compared to the average chatbot, which is a single AI system, the exocortex would be a collection of dozens of AI agents working together — customized to a researcher’s individual needs.

Each agent would be trained to carry out specific science-related tasks. A scientific literature agent, for example, could sift through published papers to find an optimal protocol for an experiment, while another AI agent collects and analyzes data from a running experiment. Additional agents could launch experiments or simulations, compare findings to previous studies, or even propose ideas for subsequent experiments.

All of the agents’ tasks will happen in concert, simultaneously, and without manual intervention, culminating in new insights delivered to the human researcher.

One design aspect of Yager’s proposed exocortex is that the AI agents will communicate with one another in plain English language. This will enable human scientists to study and audit the chains of decisions that lead to a particular AI outcome, providing much-needed opportunities to assess accuracy and exert engineering control.

Yager says the task of building an exocortex is enormous, and the developmental effort should be shared among scientists worldwide, so individual research groups can leverage their own expertise to design new agents. Ideally, scientists will one day have “an app store” from which they can download AI agents that will enhance the abilities of their own exocortex, similar to how downloading new apps adds functionality to phones. Individual AI “apps” could also be efficiently updated and replaced.

“I expect to see a multiplicative effect,” explained Yager. “As scientists simultaneously improve the individual AIs and the foundational exocortex technology, the capabilities of the exocortex will likely grow much faster than people expect.”

Of course, making the exocortex a reality won’t be easy. While scientists have designed a plethora of AIs that can interface with a user and complete specific tasks, building a network of AIs that can interact with each other is an entirely new challenge.

Yager expects each AI agent to require access to a “catalog” of the other agents and their specialized abilities, so they each can send messages describing the work they’ve done and explaining what they need from other AI agents.

“No one knows how to do this yet,” Yager said. Among the challenges is determining the ideal organization of agents. “Should it be a hierarchy where there is a chief with leaders and employees, like how a company operates? Or should it be more fluid, so the AIs figure out the workflow themselves? There is no obvious answer, and this is an exciting research question about the exocortex design that we are investigating.”

The final output of the exocortex will be a result of some sequence of decisions, planning, execution, verification, and summarization, rather than the simple text that a generative chatbot outputs. This extra iteration, promoted by the communication between AI agents and the exocortex structure, will ultimately improve the output and make the AI even more intelligent.

Read more on BNL website

Brookhaven’s Top 10 Discoveries of 2024

2024/12/192025/01/10

Lab celebrates a year of scientific successes, from creating the biggest bits of antimatter to improving qubits, catalysts, batteries, and more!

UPTON, N.Y. — With one-of-a-kind research facilities leveraged by scientists from across the nation and around the world, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory is a veritable city of science. Each year brings discoveries, from the scale of subatomic particles to the vastness of Earth’s atmosphere and the cosmos, that have the potential to power new technologies and provide solutions to major societal challenges. Here, the Lab presents, in no particular order, its top 10 discoveries of 2024 … plus a few major Brookhaven Lab milestones.

Heaviest antimatter nucleus

Antimatter sounds exotic, but it really does exist — just not for long. This year, scientists studying collisions of atomic nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) — an “atom smasher” that recreates the conditions of the early universe — discovered the heaviest antimatter nucleus ever detected. It’s composed of four antimatter particles: an antiproton, two antineutrons, and a particle called an antihyperon. It lasts only a fraction of a second before decaying into other particles. To find it, physicists from RHIC’s STAR collaboration searched through particles streaming from billions of collisions to find just 16 of the rare “antihyperhydrogen-4” particles. There used to be lots of antimatter, back when the universe first formed, but when antimatter meets ordinary matter, the two self-destruct. The ability to create new antimatter particles today, like these heavy antimatter nuclei, gives scientists new ways to test for matter-antimatter differences that might explain why the universe is made only of matter.

Low-temp, direct conversion of natural gas to liquid fuel

Brookhaven Lab chemists engineered a highly selective catalyst that can convert methane, a major component of natural gas, into methanol, an easily transportable liquid fuel, in a single, one-step reaction. This direct process for methane-to-methanol conversion runs at a temperature lower than required to make tea and exclusively produces methanol without additional byproducts. That’s a big advance over more complex traditional conversions that typically require three separate reactions, each under different conditions, including vastly higher temperatures. The simplicity of the system could make it particularly useful for tapping “stranded” natural gas reserves in isolated rural areas, far from the costly infrastructure of pipelines and chemical refineries, and without the need to transport high-pressure, flammable liquified natural gas. The team made use of tools at two DOE Office of Science user facilities at Brookhaven Lab, the Center for Functional Nanomaterials and the National Synchrotron Light Source II. They are exploring ways to work with entrepreneurial partners to bring the technology to market.

Plants’ sugar-sensing machinery

Proteins are molecular machines, with flexible pieces and moving parts. Understanding how these parts move helps scientists unravel the function that a protein plays in living things — and potentially how to change its effects. This year, a team led by Brookhaven Lab biochemists working with colleagues from DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory discovered how protein machinery in plants controls whether the plants can grow and make energy-intensive products such as oil — or instead put in place a series of steps to conserve precious resources. The researchers showed how the molecular machinery is regulated by a molecule that rises and falls with the level of sugar, the product of photosynthesis and plants’ main energy source. The research could help identify proteins or parts of proteins that scientists could engineer to make plants that produce more oil for use as biofuels or other oil-based products.

Protecting a promising qubit material

Tantalum is a superconducting material that shows great promise for building qubits, the basis of quantum computers. This year, a team that spans multiple Brookhaven departments discovered that adding a thin layer of magnesium improves tantalum by keeping it from oxidizing. The coating also improves tantalum’s purity and raises the temperature at which it operates as a superconductor. All three effects may increase tantalum’s ability to hold onto quantum information in qubits. This work was carried out as part of the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, a Brookhaven-led National Quantum Information Science Research Center, and included scientists from the Lab’s Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Science Department, Center for Functional Nanomaterials, and National Synchrotron Light Source II, as well as theorists at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It built on earlier work that also included scientists from Princeton University.

Read more on BNL website

Slow Atomic Movements Shed New Light on Unconventional Superconductivity

2024/12/042024/12/10

Materials known as unconventional superconductors can conduct electricity with no loss at higher temperatures than regular superconductors. But after 40 years of research, those temperatures are still quite cold – about 140 degrees Celsius below the freezing point of water. Engineering them to operate in much warmer conditions – a development that could spur revolutions in energy, microelectronics and other fields – requires a much better understanding of how these complex materials work.

Almost all the research so far has focused on very fast processes that may contribute to superconductivity – for instance, natural, high-frequency vibrations known as phonons that rattle a material’s atomic latticework trillions of times per second.

Now researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have taken a new look from the opposite direction: They observed how an exceedingly slow process known as atomic relaxation changes in the presence of two of the quantum states that intertwine in cuprate superconductors.

The results suggest that the relaxation process is a promising tool for exploring and understanding those two states – charge density waves (CDWs), which are stripes of higher and lower electron density in the material, and the superconducting state itself, which switches on when the material chills below its transition temperature.

The research team described the results today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more on SLAC website

Image: A SLAC research team discovered how an exceedingly slow process known as atomic relaxation changes in the presence of two of the quantum states that intertwine in cuprate superconductors. The results suggest that the relaxation process is a promising tool for exploring and understanding those two states – charge density waves (depicted above), which are stripes of higher and lower electron density in the material, and the superconducting state itself, which switches on when the material chills below its transition temperature.

Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

NSLS-II First Light 10th Anniversary

2024/10/232024/10/28

On October 23rd, 2014, the National Synchrotron Light Source II achieved “first light,” the moment when the first X-rays were delivered. Since that moment, the diverse user community, dedicated staff, array of unique beamlines, and illuminating discoveries have only continued to grow. In 2024, NSLS-II celebrate 10 brilliant years since first light and look ahead towards a bright future.

Please find the timeline on NSLS-II website

More Efficient Approach for Turning Plant Biomass into Useful Chemicals

2024/10/042024/10/17

Editor’s note: The following article was originally issued by Georgia Institute of Technology. National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) beamline scientist Eli Stavitski collaborated with researchers at Georgia Tech to evaluate their novel method of converting lignin, an organic polymer that gives wood and plants their strength, into valuable chemicals using the force of tiny steel balls instead of solvents. Using X-ray absorption spectroscopy at the Inner-Shell Spectroscopy (ISS) beamline at NSLS-II, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, the team was able to establish the mechanism of the catalytic process that efficiently breaks the bonds of lignin compounds. For more information on Brookhaven’s role in this research, contact Denise Yazak (dyazak@bnl.gov, 631-344-6371).

Lignin is one of the most plentiful organic polymers on Earth, making up about 20 to 30 percent of the dry mass of wood and other plants.

Despite this abundance, lignin’s complex structure has challenged researchers in breaking it down into useful components that can be used in the sustainable production of chemicals, plastics, and fuels. Therefore, lignin is often discarded as waste during the production of paper and other plant-based products.

However, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed an approach that could transform lignin into valuable chemicals more efficiently than ever before.

The researchers published their findings in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering on using a method known as mechanocatalysis, which uses physical forces, such as vibration or rotation, in a ball mill to drive chemical reactions without the need for solvents, heat, or high pressure.

Carsten Sievers, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, explained that the first step in a lignin biorefinery is depolymerization, which breaks lignin down into small molecules.

“Unfortunately, many depolymerization processes require the use of solvents, and separating the products from solvents, catalysts, and contaminants can be complicated, energy intensive, and leave behind waste,” Sievers said.

“One way to reduce the need for these separation steps is to perform lignin depolymerization in a ball mill where collision with steel balls create environments that enable solid-state reactions without the need for solvents or liquid phases.”

Read more on BNL website

Image: Illustration of a mechanical impact that creates a reactive environment for depolymerization of biomass into value-added chemicals.

Physicists Report New Insights Into Exotic Particles Key to Magnetism

2024/08/122024/08/19

The work on excitons, originating from ultrathin materials, could impact future electronics and establishes a new way to study these particles through a powerful instrument at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Schematic showing how exotic particles known as excitons can “hop” between nickel atoms (grey dots) in nickel dihalide materials. The excitons are represented by the red and light-blue orbitals. Credits: Image courtesy of the Comin Laboratory.

Editor’s note: The following article was originally issued by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jonathan Pelliciari and Valentina Bisogni, beamline scientists at the Soft Inelastic X-ray Scattering (SIX) beamline at the at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, collaborated with researchers from several institutions in this MIT led research into the nature of excitons in magnetic two-dimensional materials. Using resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS), a technique that can only be performed in a few facilities around the world, the team was able to see the microscopic origin of excitons in nickel dihalide, providing insight into the role these particles play in magnetism. Understanding these mechanisms could lead to new nickel-based materials that can be tuned for specific electronic and magnetic properties that could be beneficial in quantum computing applications. MIT is a partner institution of the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C²QA), a National Quantum Information Science Research Center funded by the DOE Office of Science. Brookhaven Lab is the lead institution for C²QA. For more information on Brookhaven’s role in this research, contact Denise Yazak (dyazak@bnl.gov, 631-344-6371).

MIT physicists and colleagues report new insights into exotic particles key to a form of magnetism that has attracted growing interest because it originates from ultrathin materials only a few atomic layers thick. The work, which could impact future electronics and more, also establishes a new way to study these particles through a powerful instrument at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Among their discoveries, the team has identified the microscopic origin of these particles, known as excitons. They showed how they can be controlled by chemically “tuning” the material, which is primarily composed of nickel. Further, they found that the excitons propagate throughout the bulk material instead of being bound to the nickel atoms.

Finally, they proved that the mechanism behind these discoveries is ubiquitous to similar nickel-based materials, opening the door for identifying — and controlling — new materials with special electronic and magnetic properties.

The open-access results are reported in the July 12 issue of Physical Review X.

“We’ve essentially developed a new research direction into the study of these magnetic two-dimensional materials that very much relies on an advanced spectroscopic method, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS), which is available at Brookhaven National Lab,” says Riccardo Comin, MIT’s Class of 1947 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics and leader of the work. Comin is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory and the Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Comin’s colleagues on the work include Connor A. Occhialini, an MIT graduate student in physics, and Yi Tseng, a recent MIT postdoc now at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY). The two are co-first authors of the Physical Review X paper.

Additional authors are Hebatalla Elnaggar of the Sorbonne; Qian Song, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Physics; Mark Blei and Seth Ariel Tongay of Arizona State University; Frank M. F. de Groot of Utrecht University; and Valentina Bisogni and Jonathan Pelliciari of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Read more on BNL website

Image: Schematic showing how exotic particles known as excitons can “hop” between nickel atoms (grey dots) in nickel dihalide materials. The excitons are represented by the red and light-blue orbitals.

Credit: Image courtesy of the Comin Laboratory.

Battery Scientist Honored by DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office

2024/07/302024/07/30

UPTON, N.Y. — Longer lasting batteries would allow electric vehicles (EVs) to drive farther and perhaps inspire more people to make the switch from fossil fuels. One key to better EV batteries is understanding the intricate details of how they work — and stop working.

Xiao-Qing Yang, a physicist who leads the Electrochemical Energy Storage group within the Chemistry Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has spent a good deal of his professional career doing just that. DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) recently recognized his contributions with a Distinguished Achievement Award presented during its 2024 Annual Merit Review. Each year, VTO presents awards to individuals from partner institutions for contributions to overall program efforts and to recognize research, development, demonstration, and deployment achievements in specific areas.

Yang was honored “for pioneering [the use of] advanced characterization tools, such as in situ X-ray diffraction and absorption, to analyze battery materials under operational and extreme conditions in support of VTO battery research and development (R&D) at Brookhaven National Laboratory over the last 38 years.”

Read more on BNL website

Image: Battery chemist Xiao-Qing Yang (left) with colleagues Enyuan Hu and Eli Stavitski at the Inner-Shell Spectroscopy (ISS) beamline of the National Synchrotron Light Source-II at Brookhaven National Laboratory

Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Study Reveals Reversible Assembly of Platinum Catalyst

2024/06/032024/06/13

UPTON, N.Y. — Chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University (SBU), and their collaborators have uncovered new details of the reversible assembly and disassembly of a platinum catalyst. The new understanding may offer clues to the catalyst’s stability and recyclability. The work, described in a paper just published in the journal Nanoscale, reveals how single platinum atoms on a cerium oxide support aggregate under reaction conditions to form active catalytic nanoparticles — and then, surprisingly, fragment once the reaction is stopped.

Fragmentation may sound shattering, but the scientists say it could be a plus.

“Such reversible fragmentation of a platinum nanocatalyst on cerium oxide could be potentially useful for controlling the catalyst’s long-term stability,” said Anatoly Frenkel, a chemist at Brookhaven Lab and professor at SBU who led the research.

When the platinum atoms return to their starting positions, they can be used again to remake active catalytic particles. Plus, the post-reaction fragmentation makes those active particles much less likely to fuse together irreversibly, which is a common mechanism that ultimately deactivates many nanoparticle catalysts.

“Part of the definition of a catalyst is that it helps disassemble and reassemble reacting molecules to form new products,” Frenkel noted. “But it was shocking to see a catalyst that also assembles and disassembles itself in the process.”

The paper describes how the scientists observed the nanoparticles forming as single platinum atoms aggregated on the cerium oxide surface at 572 degrees Fahrenheit (300 degrees Celsius) — the temperature of the reaction they were studying.

“After the reaction, we expected that these nanoparticles would stabilize once back at room temperature in whatever particle size they reached when they were activated,” Frenkel said. “But what we observed was a reverse process. The particles began fragmenting into single atoms again.”

The team had a hypothesis to explain what they were seeing, which was confirmed by thermodynamic calculations performed by theory colleagues at Chungnam National University in Korea. Carbon monoxide, one of the products of the reaction — often considered a “poison” for catalysts — was actively tearing the nanoparticles apart.

“Carbon monoxide molecules have a very strong repulsive interaction when they are next to each other,” Frenkel explained. During the “reverse water gas shift” reaction, which converts carbon dioxide (CO₂) and hydrogen (H₂) into carbon monoxide (CO) and water (H₂O) at high temperatures, the CO typically leaves the catalyst surface as a gas. But once the heat is turned off, the CO molecules bind strongly to the platinum atoms of the catalyst. This brings the CO molecules closer to each other as the system cools down and their numbers rise.

Read more on BNL website

Image: Scientists have shown that platinum atoms (gold spheres) on cerium oxide (red and silver/black surface) can assemble into active nanocatalysts under reaction conditions and then disassemble when cooled down before reuse.

Credit: Valerie Lentz/Brookhaven National Laboratory