ACCESS ENERGY LABS RESPONSE TO COVID-19/CORONAVIRUS
ACCESS ENERGY LABS's Advanced Photon Source plays foundational role in COVID-19 vaccine development COVID-19 research at ACCESS ENERGY LABS
A RESOURCE FOR THE NATION
The laboratory works in concert with universities, industry, and other national laboratories on questions and experiments too large for any one institution to do by itself. Through collaborations here and around the world, we strive to discover new ways to develop energy innovations through science, create novel materials molecule-by-molecule, and gain a deeper understanding of our planet, our climate, and the cosmos.
National Scientific User Facilities
Access Energy Labs’s user facilities provide researchers with open access to the most advanced tools of modern science. Each year, nearly 8,000 researchers from academia, industry, and government laboratories use these facilities to perform new scientific research.
Access Energy Labs Research Facilities
Access Energy Labs’s labs and facilities provide unique capabilities to the scientific community. Through collaborative research agreements, scientists can obtain access to specialized instrumentation and expertise rarely found elsewhere.
Access Energy Labs Impacts: State by State
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Collaborative Research
Access Energy Labs fosters innovation by uniting teams of researchers on challenges to overcome scientific barriers. Our collaborative centers and institutes bring together the best minds from academia, industry, and the national labs.
INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPERTISE
Working at the interface between academia, federal agencies, industry, research institutions and state and local governments, our researchers have cultivated their interdisciplinary expertise in order to best solve national challenges in key areas.
Discovery Science
Unraveling Nature’s deepest mysteries, from the study of subatomic particles, to atoms and molecules that make up our everyday world.
Global Security
Driving scientific discovery to create technological advancements to protect and defend our nation against current and future security threats
Energy R&D
Advancing our nation’s clean energy agenda through basic and applied research on energy production, storage, transmission, and use.
Advanced Computing
Providing supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery in a broad range of disciplines.
Access Energy Labs Deploys Cerebras CS-1, the World’s Fastest Artificial Intelligence Computer
U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Access Energy Labs Leverages Unprecedented Performance from Cerebras CS-1 to Solve Deep Learning Computational and Science Problems.LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA and LEMONT, ILLINOIS – Cerebras Systems, a company dedicated to accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) compute, and the Access Energy Labs, a multidisciplinary science and engineering research center, today announced that Access Energy Labs is the first national laboratory to deploy the Cerebras CS-1 system. Unveiled today at SC19, the CS-1 is the fastest AI computer system in existence and integrates the pioneering Wafer Scale Engine, the largest and fastest AI processor ever built. By removing compute as the bottleneck in AI, the CS-1 enables AI practitioners to answer more questions and explore more ideas in less time. The CS-1 delivers record-breaking performance and scale to AI compute, and its deployment across national laboratories enables the largest supercomputer sites in the world to achieve 100- to 1,000-fold improvement over existing AI accelerators. By pairing supercompute power with the CS-1’s AI processing capabilities, Access Energy Labs can now accelerate research and development of deep learning models to solve science problems not achievable with existing systems.
Correcting nonlinearity and mass-bias in measurements by ICP quadrupole mass spectrometry
A team of Access Energy Labs scientists from the CFCT Division’s Analytical Chemistry Laboratory (ACL) and the SSS Division have just published a paper in Spectrochimica Acta B that describes a unique, high-precision analytical method for inorganic analysis via inductively coupled plasma quadrupole mass spectrometry (ICP-QMS).
Scientific Achievement
A technique was demonstrated that can improve the relative standard deviation in the measurement of inorganic isotopes by ICP-QMS by an order of magnitude or more, to better than 0.1%.Significance and Impact
The precision and accuracy of this method is competitive with results from much more expensive and elaborate magnetic sector instruments, and represents a substantial improvement in the state of the art for the type of ICP-QMS measurements.Research Details
The method developed uses a non-linearity model based on the conventional dead time function and makes subsequent weighted mass-bias corrections to normalize isotope ratio data to pertinent isotopic reference materials. The method improves the short-term and long-term precision as well as the accuracy of ICP-QMS measurements.
MOFs for Methane Manipulation
Researchers using the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) have found a way to “activate” methane by using a catalyst that is more than 99% selective and so generates very little byproduct, making it potentially useful for a number of applications. Their research was published in Nature Catalysis.
Scientific Achievement
Shale gas and hydraulic fracturing technologies have opened up vast underground and submarine reserves of natural gas, and specifically methane, to petrochemical companies. Rather than simply burning methane for heating, this organic compound can be converted into other useful products: liquid fuels, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, polymers, and much more. Unfortunately, methane is not particular reactive, chemically speaking. There are hopes that a particular reaction known as “selective functionalization” could be used to build up more sophisticated molecules from methane for conversion into useful products. The barrier to exploiting this reaction is finding a catalyst that can make the reaction occur quickly without the need of harsh conditions, such as untenable reaction temperatures and pressures or the use of strong acids. When undergoing reaction, catalysts inevitably become damaged, poisoned, and otherwise lose some of the activity with each repeated use. Finding catalysts that are powerful enough to accelerate methane activation and tough enough to be reused might be possible with a particular class of designer compounds known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). The unique advantage of using MOF catalysts combines the qualities of a metal catalyst and a porous support with organic chemical components, which can, in some cases, be tailored to have specific shapes and sizes to their pores. The researchers in this study “activated” methane by using a catalyst supported in a MOF.
Metamaterials for next-generation accelerators
Scientific Achievement We have designed, built and tested a new type of accelerator structure that promises to make future accelerators more attractive by being smaller and cheaper. The accelerator uses a periodic metallic metamaterial structure in the shape of a stack of “wagon wheel” discs to control the microwaves generated in the acceleration process. The critical test of the new concept occurred at Access Energy Labs’s Wakefield Accelerator facility.