BYLINE: Greg Cunningham

Newswise — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have uncovered a path to design superionic polymer electrolytes for solid-state batteries and other energy applications that could help ensure a future of abundant and reliable energy for the United States. The scientists demonstrated that by carefully controlling the chemical composition of a lithium salt-based polymer, they could create a material that enables superfast transport of ions in batteries and many other energy storage and conversion technologies.

“Researchers around the world are focusing on unlocking the potential of polymer electrolytes because they have a lot of advantages over the conventional liquid electrolytes,” said Catalin Gainaru, an R&D staff scientist of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division. “Achieving fast ion transport has always been a major challenge of polymer electrolytes, but our recent research demonstrates that this may no longer be the case.”

Batteries are made up of two electrodes — a cathode and an anode — separated by an electrolyte material. As a battery charges or discharges, ions need to have a high mobility within the electrolyte as they move back and forth between electrodes. Traditional batteries use liquid or gel electrolytes, but the demand for safer and more efficient power storage has spurred interest in solid-state batteries in which the electrolyte is solid, yielding a battery that is faster charging, safer, more compact and durable. 

The challenge of ion transport in solid-state batteries

Many solid-state concepts use ceramic electrolytes that transport ions so effectively that they are known as superionic ceramics. Unfortunately, these ceramics are prone to break due to brittleness. They are also difficult to roll into thin films and don’t adhere well to the electrodes in a battery. The ORNL researchers demonstrated how a polymeric material can achieve a similar superionic state, in which ions can move up to 10 billion times faster than their surroundings, without the shortcomings of liquids and ceramics. 

Polymers are materials formed by long molecular chains made up of small, repeating building blocks. Well-known examples include a variety of plastics, which are usually made up of repeating units containing carbon and other atoms. The ORNL polymer electrolyte contains polar segments that favor the inclusion of lithium salts and strongly enhance the mobility of ions. 

The research, which was published in Materials Today, was performed as part of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) known as the Fast and Cooperative Ion Transport in Polymer-Based Materials (FaCT) Center. 

“The goal of the FaCT EFRC is to fully understand how to design novel polymers that change the paradigm of ion transport,” said Tomonori Saito, an ORNL distinguished researcher in ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division. “We developed a very special polymer in which the segments self-organize to provide a high mobility path for the ions to move through.”

A molecular design strategy enables superionic behavior

The key development was the careful tuning of the structure of the polymer by the addition of precise amounts of molecular groups known as zwitterions. These special functional groups carry both positive and negative charges, which increases local polarity but results in a zero charge for the entire macromolecule. By using careful chemical processes, researchers were able to tailor the number of zwitterionic groups attached to the polymer backbone allowing the ions to assemble into pockets. 

In these pockets, ions interact much like conversationalists at a dinner party. At first, small pockets of diffuse conversations form, isolated throughout the material. Add more pockets, though, and the discussions eventually lose individuality and evolve into a pleasant and cohesive hum. That’s when the ions start to flow like good conversation. But add too many zwitterions, and the cohesive hum devolves into a cacophony and ion transport slows back down. 

Researchers found that the sweet spot was achieved by functionalizing around 80 percent of the units of the polymer electrolyte with zwitterionic groups. At this point, the pockets connect into channel-like structures that allow ions to hop back and forth in an orderly fashion with minimal resistance.

The research team plans to build on this promising early-stage research with additional investigations into the fundamental mechanisms that enable the superionic nature of the polymer. Modeling and simulations using ORNL supercomputing resources as well as robotic autonomous chemistry coupled with AI will help understand what drives this fascinating performance, and neutron scattering studies are planned at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL, to observe the interactions at the molecular level. 

While solid-state batteries are a clear application for the new electrolyte, many energy technologies also rely on effective ion transport. Flow batteries, fuel cells, grid-level energy storage and many other applications could benefit from these newly developed polymers. 

“It’s hard to predict all the technologies that could leverage this discovery,” Saito said. “Anything that needs an impermeable barrier layer, but let ions move freely across it, is a potential application.”

The research was funded by the DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences as part of the FaCT EFRC.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. 

BYLINE: Dawn Levy

Newswise — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a method to convert a commonly discarded hydrocarbon polymer into gasoline- and diesel-like fuels. The team has applied for a patent for the discovery, which treats polyethylene — the stuff of white cutting boards and shopping bags — with aluminum chloride-containing molten salts that serve as both solvent and catalyst. The results were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

 

The scientists closely monitored the chemical reaction that turns the polymer into petrol to learn the secrets of its success. Soft X-ray spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance showed that charged aluminum atoms each bind to three other atoms to create strongly acidic catalytic sites that break long polymer chains into shorter ones. Isotopic labeling and neutron scattering revealed how simpler polymer chains form gasoline-like fuels and more complex chains form diesel-like fuels.

 

If scaled beyond the laboratory, the process could strengthen U.S. energy security and industrial competitiveness.

 

“We developed an efficient and selective polyethylene-to-gasoline conversion,” said Liqi Qiu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who performed most of the study’s experiments in the ORNL laboratory of Sheng Dai, of ORNL and UTK. Dai, an ORNL Corporate Fellow and section head for separations and polymer chemistry, is a co-corresponding author of the paper.

 

The experiments produced a gasoline yield of about 60 percent under mild conditions.

 

“We converted polymer waste to value-added fuels by using commercially available inorganic salts as the reaction media to provide the catalytic sites,” said Zhenzhen Yang, an ORNL staff scientist who was also a co-corresponding author of the paper. “Unlike traditional techniques for converting polymer to fuel, the new process did not require noble-metal catalysts, organic solvents or external hydrogen. This is the first time molten salts were used as media to produce high-value-added chemicals from waste without any catalytic initiator or solvent and at temperature below 200 degrees Celsius.”

 

That temperature is comparable to a conventional kitchen oven. Previously, converting polyethylene to gasoline required temperatures of 450 to 500 degrees Celsius through pyrolysis, a heat-driven process that breaks long polymer chains into smaller hydrocarbons.

 

ORNL has pioneered molten salt research since the 1960s, when its Molten Salt Reactor Experiment showed that molten salt mixtures could serve as both fuel and coolant in a nuclear reactor. 

 

Dai proposed using molten salts to turn polymer waste into fuel. Molten salts are inorganic compounds that remain stable under harsh reaction conditions. 

 

“The ORNL system solves two fundamental issues,” Dai said. “One, for a stable system, the process can be radically easier to scale up. Two, the previous system needed an initiator to kick off catalytic reactions. However, the ORNL system does not need one.”

 

ORNL’s Tomonori Saito managed the project and contributed polymer expertise. “In this case we tackled polyethylene, a widely available commodity polymer, using molten salt,” he said. “We’re trying to understand fundamental science that will lead to discoveries and new economic opportunities.”

 

Achieving that understanding required multidisciplinary expertise and advanced instruments.

 

At ORNL, to identify hydrocarbon products formed from reactions with various polymer chains, Luke Daemen employed neutron scattering, and Felipe Polo-Garzon used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

 

When the polymer interacted with an aluminum site, it created a positively charged ion of carbon. Qiu, Yang and Dai labeled that carbon ion with deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, to track its behavior during the reactions. They also used neutrons at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source to track hydrogen.

 

“The polymer contains a lot of hydrogen,” Dai said. “Neutrons are ideal at discerning light elements including hydrogen and its isotopes, such as deuterium.”

 

To probe structural changes to aluminum sites during the reaction, Yang used the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Working with Min-Jae Kim and Jinhua Guo there, she used soft X-rays to examine how aluminum sites interacted with the polymer at atomic and electronic levels. Soft X-rays are ideal for imaging lightweight elements like aluminum.

 

“The aluminum edge shifted to the low-electron-density edge, which means some electron-rich intermediates formed,” Yang said. “We compared the findings with other techniques and confirmed an aromatic ring intermediate can coordinate with aluminum and cause a binding-energy change.”

 

That change indicated that the aluminum sites were catalytically active.

 

Back at ORNL, Bobby Sumpter of the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences conducted simulations to examine the reaction’s energy dynamics, such as formation and transfer of stable carbon ions to hydrocarbons.

 

At UTK, Michael Koehler used in situ X-ray diffraction to monitor phase changes in the reaction mixture, and Carlos Alberto Steren used nuclear magnetic resonance to examine aluminum sites.

 

ORNL’s Tao Wang lent expertise in molten salts. ORNL’s Logan Kearney provided high-density polymers and expert suggestions for their valorization paths.

 

Although the aluminum-site system is catalytically active and inexpensive, it is hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs water and loses stability. Next, the team hopes to explore ways to confine molten salts, maybe with halogens or carbons, to improve separation and processing.

 

The findings expand options for producing transportation and industrial fuels. “Polymer source material is abundantly available from consumer waste, and our catalyst system, aluminum molten salts, is very cheap,” Qiu said. “This advance may be promising for industry.”

 

The DOE Office of Science (Materials Sciences and Engineering Division) primarily supported the research as well as the gas chromatography-mass spectrometry work (Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences Division, Catalysis Science program). The research employed DOE Office of Science user facilities at ORNL (the Spallation Neutron Source for neutron scattering at the VISION beamline and the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences for quantum chemistry calculations) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (the Advanced Light Source for soft X-ray spectra).

 

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Dawn Levy

Newswise — When astronomers point their telescopes to the heavens, they tend to look toward the light. They may search for the pin pricks of shining stars, the billowing of cold gas clouds, the faint heat of a star nursery or the rhythmic blaze of a pulsar. These faint signals of light beckon in a universe that is mostly dark.

In fact, the visible bits only account for 5% of the universe, while the dark side makes up the other 95%.

Now, an ongoing experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is aiming a spotlight into this so-called hidden dark sector. It aims to uncover hints of particles that interact with the dark by catching their light. 

“You underestimate the power of the dark side.”

Most of our universe is currently thought to be composed of dark matter and dark energy. While the dark sector isn’t visible to light microscopes, its existence is inferred by how it affects the stars and galaxies we study.

Currently, it’s thought that fully 27% of our universe is dark matter. This is matter that, as far as we know, isn’t made of the ordinary particles found in the Standard Model, the theoretical framework that nuclear physicists use to describe the subatomic particles that build our visible universe, such as protons and neutrons.

According to Liping Gan, the Jefferson Lab Eta Factory (JEF) experiment aims to capture hints of particles that connect the light and dark sides. Gan is a professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and a spokesperson for the JEF experiment. She says one of the goals of the experiment is to produce and capture hints of dark matter particles.

“One of the first ones is to search for dark gauge bosons. And that will give us some clue about the properties of the dark sector,” she said. 

If they do exist, dark gauge bosons would be rare examples of particles that can interact with the ordinary particles described in the Standard Model, as well as the mysterious dark matter particles.

To search for these bosons, ironically, the physicists will be looking for faint signals of light. 

“There’s no such thing as ‘the unknown’, only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.”

The experiment will be carried out with the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility accessed by more than 1,700 nuclear physicists worldwide to study the nature of matter.

The original GlueX Forward Calorimeter, as installed in Jefferson Lab’s Experimental Hall D. (Aileen Devlin / Jefferson Lab)

In the experiment, the CEBAF accelerator will generate a beam of energetic electrons and direct them into a diamond crystal. There, the electrons stimulate the diamond to release highly energetic light particles, or photons. These tiny but mighty particles of light then barrel into a target made of hydrogen. 

Hydrogen atoms are the simplest element to explore: a single proton makes up the atom’s nucleus, while the motion of a single electron forms the atom’s outer perimeter. The interactions of those photons with hydrogen’s protons spawn additional particles that will then enter detectors, where many of them can be measured.

JEF experimenters are most interested in producing the eta (η) meson. Like the proton, the η meson is made of a combination of smaller particles called quarks and gluons. But unlike the proton, the η isn’t stable. Instead, it will fall apart, or decay, into other particles in about half of an attosecond (5×10-19 seconds).

“Then our goal becomes looking for a decay. There are very many different decay channels we are going to measure, because a different decay channel tells us a different part of the physics,” explained Gan. 

According to Simon Taylor, a Jefferson Lab staff scientist and spokesperson for the JEF experiment, the experimenters are looking for rare decays.

“And a particular rare decay that we’ve been focusing on is a four-photon final state,” he said. 

“Only 18 out of 10,000 will decay to this. Most of the etas will decay into two gammas. So that’s why we call it rare reaction or rare decays, it happens only for a small fraction of the experiment,” Gan said.

The most interesting decay channels in this experiment are when η may produce a dark gauge boson. Dark gauge bosons are thought to be both exceedingly rare and short-lived. They, too, will decay away into other particles in the tiniest of fractions of a second. 

“These other particles include photons of light. We don’t know if these dark gauge bosons exist or will be produced in these decays, but this decay mode will allow us to search for them,” said Taylor.

The researchers will sift through the data they collect to see if they can discover unexpected peaks in their data, where there are more four-photon groupings than they expect. This will trigger intensive analysis to determine if each of these “bumps” is a tell-tale sign of the η meson decay.

Justin Stevens is the Wilson & Martha Claiborne Stephens associate professor of physics at William & Mary and spokesperson for phase two of the Gluonic Excitations Experiment (GlueX-II). The JEF and GlueX-II experiments are running concurrently using the same apparatus. He explained that one of the biggest challenges the two experiments face is finding those tell-tale bumps of interest inside the ginormous amount of data that will be generated. 

For context, 50 million light photons slam into the hydrogen target every second during the run. Each one has the potential to generate a few to dozens of particles that will stream into the detectors, all at once.

“We are getting something like 5 to 10 times higher luminosity in total compared to the original phase of GlueX,” Stevens said.

Taylor said that there are also other issues that will make finding a rare bump a challenge.

“It can get confused with other reactions,” Taylor explained. “Photons are detected by reconstructing the electromagnetic showers they produce in a calorimeter.  Some tiny fraction of the time, one or more of the photons disappear down the beam line or in a hole in the detector. Or two very close showers of particles may merge in the calorimeter together.”

To ensure the researchers would be able to capture these rare reactions, they needed to optimize one of their main detectors. An upgrade would ensure the detector can measure the photons it catches to such accuracy, the physicists could be sure they are capturing signals from a potential dark gauge boson and not from the remnants of incoming photons or from other reactions.

“You can’t stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere.”

For this experiment, the JEF collaboration upgraded the existing GlueX Forward Calorimeter (FCAL) to improve its resolution and hardiness. 

A view of the FCAL system during the upgrade. (Aileen Devlin / Jefferson Lab)

FCAL originally consisted of 2,800 lead glass scintillating modules connected to photomultiplier tubes. Each module has a 4 cm square face to collect the incoming particles produced in the experiment. These modules were designed to capture incoming particles and convert them into showers of light as the particles travel down their 45 cm length. This light can then be measured by the photomultiplier tubes and converted into signals that are recorded as data.

The upgrade removed 440 of the lead glass modules at the center of the detector and replaced them with 1,596 smaller lead tungstate (PbWO4) crystals. The new crystals feature only a 2 cm square face and extend 20 cm in length. They form a central square inside the new Eta Calorimeter (ECAL) that is surrounded by 2,360 of the original lead glass modules. 

A lead glass scintillating module (left) with a lead tungstate (PbWO4) crystal (right) are shown here inside Experimental Hall D. (Aileen Devlin / Jefferson Lab)

Zisis Papandreou is a JEF experiment spokesperson and a professor and head of the physics department at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan Canada. He compared the upgraded detector to a digital camera.

“Essentially, we’re reconstructing something akin to an image. If you have a larger number of smaller pixels, you can improve the resolution in the image,” he said.

The new lead tungstate crystals are also radiation-hard, which means they can better withstand the onslaught of particles generated in experiments than the original lead glass modules. Centering the new crystal modules closest to the target allows them to take the brunt of the onslaught, protecting the lead glass modules from the highest-energy particles and resulting in a longer overall detector lifetime.

Funded by the lab, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, the upgrade of FCAL to ECAL cost about $5 million. Several work groups at the lab also contributed to the upgrade, including the Radiation Detector & Imaging group, the Detector Support group, the Radiation Control Department, and the Fast Electronics group. 

After four years of R&D, the full-scale upgrade took about three years to complete, beginning in 2022 and wrapping up in early 2025. According to Alexander Somov, a staff scientist at Jefferson Lab and a spokesperson for the JEF experiment who led the ECAL construction, the detector has already proven its versatility.

“It is the largest lead-tungstate crystal calorimeter in the U.S., and it’s been successfully commissioned and integrated,” said Somov. “It took a few weeks to commission, and all modules are operational. It was working fine for the first run of approximately five months.”

ECAL was successfully commissioned in April 2025, with data acquired for JEF and GlueX-II in late spring and summer 2025. So far, the detector has collected about 75 days of data as counted by the Program Advisory Committee for the two experiments.

“And the first results we’re getting show that the performance of ECAL is in good agreement with our basic expectations. But there’s more analysis to come,” said Somov.

University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) Physics Professor Liping Gan, George Washington University undergraduate student Olivia Nippe-Jeakins, UNCW undergraduate students Shane Whaley and Ben Simpson, Jefferson Lab Hall D Staff Scientist Alexander “Sasha” Somov, and UNCW postdoc Laveen Puthiya Veetil pose for a photo inside Jefferson Lab’s Experimental Hall D. (Aileen Devlin | Jefferson Lab)

The upgraded detector has also served as a training ground for undergraduate physics majors interested in pursuing a career in nuclear physics. In all, 28 undergraduate students from the JEF experiment’s 11 collaborating universities participated in ECAL fabrication, installation and commissioning. The project also involved three graduate students, six postdoctoral nuclear physicists and one visiting scientist. 

“These are valuable experiences to undergraduates and then later on, they go to graduate school and some of them already were talking about going to a university that has GlueX collaborators. So, the hardware work is an absolutely amazing experience for students,” said Papandreou.

“You built a time machine? Out of a DeLorean?”

The second and final run for these experiments is currently scheduled to resume this summer. In it, the collaborators also aim to collect data that may reveal new clues to our understanding of other phenomena, such as why matter beat out antimatter in the first second of the early universe.

George Washington University undergraduate Quinn Stefan, left, and graduate student Phoebe Sharp, right, monitor experiment progress inside the Experimental Hall D counting house at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Va., on June 17, 2025. (Aileen Devlin | Jefferson Lab)

“For example, right now we see large asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe, and one of the goals is to search for maybe there’s some new symmetry violation beyond the Standard Model. The third goal is to understand why quantum chromodynamics (QCD) prevents quarks from being isolated via tests of fundamental symmetries at low energy,” Somov said.

Alongside these searches, the GlueX-II experiment collaborators are looking to expand their data on particles that include charm quarks, such as the J/ψ (J/psi) meson. While the more familiar protons and neutrons are made of up and down quarks, other subatomic particles include other quark flavors, such as the charm quark. These data offer a rare opportunity to look at in depth at how such particles are made.

“So that means we can do things like study J/ψ production with a lot higher statistics and look for the charm production mechanism with a lot more precision than we had before,” said Stevens.

As the collaborators prepare for their final data run, they have also already begun preparing for the next opportunity. The proposed GlueX-III run aims to increase the intensity of the photon beam. For GlueX, it achieved about 10 million photons per second, and GlueX-II has an intensity of about 50 million photons per second. The goal for GlueX-III is to slowly crank that up to around one hundred million photons per second.

“Once you understand the detector, you just drive up the rate,” Stevens said. “So, we’re going to keep pushing up the intensity as high as we can, because we just get more data. You can look at more rare decays, more rare processes.”

In the meantime, the collaborators have their hands full preparing for their next run this summer and are looking forward to what their data reveal about the light and dark sides of our universe.

Further Reading
GWU Research Magazine: The Particle Whisperers
UNCW: Undergraduates Step Into Physics Research
Technical Paper: Eta Decays with Emphasis on Rare Neutral Modes: The JLab Eta Factory (JEF) Experiment
Technical Paper: Update to the JEF proposal (PR12-14-004)
Technical Paper: Light monitoring system for the lead tungstate calorimeter in Hall D at Jefferson Lab

Newswise — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory made a major contribution to a high-profile experiment seeking to discover new physics. Hosted at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the Mu2e (muon-to-electron conversion) experiment aims to observe an extremely rare process in particle physics. The experiment is a multiyear collaboration among more than 30 institutions and 200 scientists from around the world.

An Argonne team of high energy physics scientists designed and — most recently — commissioned a crucial Mu2e subsystem called the Cosmic Ray Veto (CRV) detector. This subsystem filters out the biggest source of background noise in Mu2e. Background noise refers to signals that mimic the rare process that Mu2e seeks to detect. The commissioning tests demonstrated that the CRV detector is working properly and collecting background data.

The CRV’s development and deployment was a collaborative effort among Argonne, Fermilab, Kansas State University, University of South Alabama, University of Virginia, Northern Illinois University and University of Michigan.

“The CRV detector will enable Mu2e to more reliably and accurately detect an event expected to be vanishingly rare according to current particle physics theory,” said Yuri Oksuzian, an Argonne physicist who has played a key role in Mu2e and the CRV’s development. ​“The CRV is essential because it screens out background noise that could mimic this event. Observing even a few cases of the event would be compelling evidence of new physics.”

Searching for a muon-to-electron conversion

Since the 1970s, the dominant theory in particle physics has been the Standard Model. Widely considered a robust theory, the Standard Model describes the interactions among the fundamental particles and forces in the universe. But it leaves many big questions unanswered. For example, it cannot explain gravity or dark matter, a mysterious type of matter that cannot be observed directly.

As a result, particle physicists are searching for new theories, particles and forces beyond the Standard Model. The aim is to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the universe.

Mu2e seeks to observe a muon changing to an electron without any other particles being produced. A muon is a fundamental particle that is a heavier version of an electron. The Standard Model expects this transition to be so rare that observing it at Mu2e would be a major discovery and strong evidence of new physics.

“If Mu2e detects a muon-to-electron conversion, it would indicate that there’s a new particle or force involved in this process,” said Oksuzian. ​“The discovery would fundamentally change our understanding of how the universe works.”

Screening out cosmic-ray muons

The Mu2e apparatus directs a high-intensity beam of muons to a thin aluminum foil target. Detectors probe the target for conversion events, indicated by the presence of electrons with a precise amount of energy and momentum. Remarkably, Mu2e is expected to be 10,000 times more sensitive to conversions than previous similar experiments.

The apparatus has critical subsystems that measure background — in other words, signals that look like conversions but aren’t. A major background source is cosmic rays. These are high-energy particles from space that collide with atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere. The collisions produce showers of particles, including muons, that reach the ground.

Muons can penetrate the Mu2e apparatus and knock electrons from the aluminum foil. These free electrons can potentially have the exact energy and momentum of an electron from a conversion event. If that happens, Mu2e’s detectors will mistakenly register them as the real signal.

The CRV detector, engineered by Argonne, detects background events caused by cosmic-ray muons. It is essentially a giant cage that covers key parts of the Mu2e apparatus. It consists of 83 modules, which together weigh about 60 tons. The modules are made of thousands of plastic strips that produce light photons when muons pass through them.

Special fibers inside the strips carry the photons to sensors called silicon photomultipliers. The sensors measure the photons, indicating the exact time of the muon’s passage. If the CRV detects a cosmic muon just before an electron appears in the Mu2e apparatus, that electron is rejected from the data.

“We had to carefully design the CRV structure so that there are no gaps between the modules,” said Oksuzian. ​“The objective was to ensure that the detector would not miss any cosmic muons.”

Without the CRV, cosmic-ray muons would produce thousands of ​“fake” conversion events over Mu2e’s three-to-five-year run time. Because muon-to-electron conversions are so rare, even a small number of fake events would compromise Mu2e’s accuracy. As a result, the CRV must detect and reject 99.99% of cosmic-ray muons passing through. Argonne recently evaluated the CRV’s performance over a two-year period and found that it can meet this strict design requirement.

Commissioning the CRV at Mu2e

Recently, the Argonne team transported the CRV components to the Mu2e building at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and commissioned them to detect cosmic-ray muons. The successful test enabled the CRV to fulfill a key DOE technical milestone and performance objective, helping to advance Mu2e’s commissioning. Other Mu2e subsystems will be commissioned and tested over the next year.

The experiment is expected to begin in 2027. Argonne scientists will have important roles in Mu2e operations, including the CRV, data acquisition system and analysis of datasets.

Besides Oksuzian, Argonne’s CRV team also includes Simon Corrodi, Sam Grant, Peter Winter and Lei Xia.

DOE’s Office of Science is a key supporter of Mu2e and Argonne’s CRV research and oversees Mu2e’s implementation.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.

BYLINE: Tina M. Johnson

Newswise — Gevo, an advanced biofuels company based in Colorado, has licensed two patented catalyst technologies from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for use in the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

“This partnership will streamline the transition of ORNL’s catalyst technologies from lab scale to pilot-scale reactors,” said Andrew Sutton, senior scientist in the Manufacturing Science Division at ORNL. “By demonstrating industrial viability, our goal is to accelerate the commercialization of this technology in the U.S., boosting global competitiveness and domestic production of aviation fuel.”

SAF is an alternative fuel made from plant- or waste-based feedstocks. The International Air Transport Association, representing more than 80% of global air traffic, is interested in SAF. Many air carriers have agreed to buy the fuel at scale, but production efficiencies remain an issue.

To meet the challenge, researchers at ORNL developed catalysts that enable a single-step conversion of ethanol to olefins (ETO), which can then be used to produce SAF. A catalyst accelerates chemical reactions and enhances the efficiency of the fuel production process.

In addition to SAF, olefins serve as key building blocks for a wide range of products, including plastics, solvents and surfactants. The global plastics market is poised for continued growth, with forecasts predicting a market worth more than $1.3 trillion by 2033.

Ethanol, commonly derived from agricultural or cellulosic feedstocks, often serves as the basis for SAF production through its conversion to olefins — key intermediates that simplify and reduce the cost of large-scale fuel manufacturing. Building on this foundation, ORNL’s novel conversion process not only achieves high carbon efficiency but does so at equal or lower cost compared with conventional methods.

Through the DOE Technology Commercialization Fund, the partnership was awarded support for a three-year cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) to advance this technology for pilot-scale operation and industrial commercialization. Gevo will guide the overall process model and provide industry know-how for successful implementation in the company’s pilot reactor.

“Gevo’s collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory focuses on evaluating a novel catalytic process that converts ethanol into valuable fuel precursors and alternative chemicals like butadiene,” said Andrew Ingram, Gevo’s director of process chemistry and catalysis. “This work complements our broader ethanol conversion portfolio but is distinct from both our commercial deployment of Axens’ alcohol-to-jet process and our next-generation ETO platform. If the economics prove out, this pathway could provide a flexible, cost-effective option to scale U.S. bio-based solutions, driven by American innovation that creates new markets and demand for farmers producing feedstocks for energy and materials.”

ORNL provides extensive scale-up expertise, employing advanced characterization capabilities at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which was used to provide deeper insight into catalytic processes in larger chemical reactors.

Under the CRADA, ORNL will develop catalyst pellets and test their performance in an advanced chemical reactor. Researchers will develop a computational model based on the testing data generated that can accurately predict how the process will behave at scale to clear the way for industrial use. 

Global demand for jet fuel is expected to increase from 106 billion gallons in 2019 to 230 billion gallons by 2050. Expanding SAF use could help the aviation industry meet this demand while advancing U.S. energy independence and security.

This project was supported by DOE’s Alternative Fuels and Feedstocks Office, formerly known as the Bioenergy Technologies Office, through the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy (ChemCatBio), a multi-laboratory consortium focused on accelerating the development of catalytic technologies that convert biomass and waste resources into bio-based fuels and chemicals. Initial program funding was provided by ORNL Laboratory Directed Research and Development and Technology Innovation programs.

In addition to Sutton, Stephen Purdy, Meijun Li, Michael Cordon and Hunter Jacobs are currently contributing to the CRADA project. Inventors of the patented technologies include ORNL’s Li and Brian Davison, former ORNL researcher Zhenglong Li and the University of Maryland’s Junyan Zhang. Jennifer Caldwell within Technology Transfer at ORNL negotiated the terms of the licensing agreement. Browse available chemical technologies for licensing.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit https://energy.gov/science. — Tina M. Johnson

Newswise — Scientists discovered how tiny changes in superhydride structure enable superconductivity at near room temperatures but extreme pressure — offering clues for designing more practical superconductors.

Superconductors allow electricity to flow without resistance, meaning no energy is lost as heat. This property makes them useful for technologies such as MRI scanners, particle accelerators, magnetic-levitation trains and some power-transmission systems. Most superconductors, however, only work at extremely low temperatures — often hundreds of degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Keeping materials that cold requires complex and costly cooling systems, which limits where the superconductors can be used.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have helped take a step toward easing that limitation. They have gained new insight into a class of materials called superhydrides that can become superconducting at much higher temperatures — around 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

The research was carried out with collaborators from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), the University of Chicago and DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A key tool was the upgraded Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne.

“These experiments show what the upgraded APS can do. We can now study atomic-level structures with unprecedented detail in materials under extreme pressure.” — Maddury Somayazulu, Argonne physicist

Superhydrides are made mostly of hydrogen, held together in an ordered structure (crystal) by a small number of metal atoms. When subjected to extremely high pressures, these materials can carry electric current with no resistance. In a landmark 2018 study, researchers led by UIC professor Russell Hemley showed that a lanthanum-based superhydride could superconduct near 8 degrees Fahrenheit. The drawback was that it only worked at pressures equivalent to those deep within the Earth (1.88 million atmospheres), making it impractical outside the lab.

In the new study, Hemley and his fellow researchers explored whether changing the material’s chemistry could lower the pressure needed for superconductivity. They added a small amount of yttrium to the lanthanum superhydride to make it more stable and reduce the pressure required.

“To reach these extreme pressures, we squeezed a tiny sample between two diamonds,” said Maddury Somayazulu, a physicist at the APS. The team’s diamond-anvil device can generate pressures as high as five million atmospheres.

After forming the superconducting material at high pressure and temperature, the team used high-energy X-rays from the APS to study its structure (at beamlines 16-ID-B and 13-ID-D). ​“We focused an intense X-ray beam onto a sample only a few micrometers thick and about ten to twenty micrometers across,” said Vitali Prakapenka, a beamline scientist and research professor at the University of Chicago. One micrometer is about 1/70^th the width of a human hair.

The recent APS upgrade made these measurements possible. Its brighter, more tightly focused X-ray beam allowed researchers to study extremely small samples while changing the pressure. ​“That beam allowed us to separate signals coming from the tiny sample itself as opposed to those coming from the surrounding materials and diamond anvils,” Prakapenka said.

The team found that small differences in how atoms are arranged in a crystalline lattice can strongly affect superconductivity. They identified two different crystal structures, each becoming superconducting at a slightly different temperature.

“These experiments show what the upgraded APS can do,” Somayazulu said. ​“We can now study atomic-level structures with unprecedented detail in materials under extreme pressure.”

Although the pressures used in the experiments are still very high — about 1.4 million times atmospheric pressure — the researchers see this as part of a longer path forward. They are adding more elements to lower the pressure further with the goal of making these materials practical.

Diamonds provide a useful comparison, Somayazulu explained. Natural diamonds form deep inside the Earth under extreme pressure and temperature. Scientists later learned how to synthesize them in the lab, and eventually how to produce them without such intense conditions. Researchers believe superhydrides could follow a similar path.

“If we understand the physics well enough, we may be able to stabilize these structures at much lower pressures but still attain superconductivity close to room temperature,” Prakapenka said.

Experimental data from the APS will help guide theoretical models and AI tools in that search for new materials. Instead of testing only a few combinations at quite-challenging-to-reach extreme conditions, scientists can use AI to explore many possible multi-element compositions. They can then focus experiments on the most promising ones.

“The calculations are very demanding,” Prakapenka said. ​“Theorists rely on high-quality experimental data to make their predictions more accurate.”

Finding a material that superconducts at near room temperature and normal pressure could reshape the nation’s electrical infrastructure.

The research was supported by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences, DOE National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Science Foundation. Contributors include Maddury Somayazulu, Russell Hemley, Vitali Prakapenka, Abdul Haseeb Manayil-Marathamkottil, Kui Wang, Nilesh Salke, Muhtar Ahart, Alexander Mark, Rostislav Hrubiak, Stella Chariton, Dean Smith and Nenad Velisavljevic.

This article was adapted from the UIC release.

About the Advanced Photon Source

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.

Newswise — UPTON, N.Y. — Mike Jensen, a meteorologist and interim chair of the Environmental Science and Technologies Department at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, is a recipient of the DOE Distinguished Mentor Award for Workforce Development, a new award program that recognizes outstanding mentors from across DOE’s 17 national laboratories and their essential roles in developing STEM professionals.

Jensen is one of four mentors honored by DOE’s Office of Science for their excellence in guiding future scientists, engineers, and technical professionals through unique access to world-leading expertise, scientific user facilities, and research tools found at multidisciplinary national laboratories.

“The establishment of the DOE Distinguished Mentor Award for Workforce Development directly aligns with our strategic objectives to not only recognize exceptional mentorship but also to actively cultivate best practices across our National Laboratories,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “By illuminating these exemplary efforts, we reinforce a vibrant mentoring ecosystem crucial for advancing the DOE’s mission and strengthening the U.S. workforce. We look forward to celebrating our inaugural awardees and hearing their insights and experiences.”  

The mentors will be celebrated at a virtual ceremony later this year. Each awardee will receive $10,000 to be used for research and mentoring-related development.

Over the years, Jensen has mentored dozens of students — from high schoolers to graduate-level researchers — through programs supported by DOE’s Office of Science and Brookhaven Lab. His mentees have participated in DOE programs such as Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI), Office of Science Graduate Student Research, the Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists Pathway Summer Schools, and various Brookhaven pre-college offerings such as the High School Research Program (HSRP).

“I’m honored and humbled to be awarded,” said Jensen, who leads his department’s Cloud Processes and Measurement Group and is a principal investigator for the Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program’s Process-level AdvancementS of Coupled Cloud and Aerosol LifecycleS (PASCCALS) Science Focus Area and an active participant with the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility, a multi-laboratory, DOE scientific user facility. “I consider mentorship an important part of my job as a scientist to help with the next generation, and I enjoy that part. It’s nice to be rewarded for something that I like doing.”

In his scientific work, Jensen collects data in the field to analyze and better understand the processes that drive the evolution of cloud systems and their role in the water cycle and the Earth’s energy balance. In field campaigns such as the TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment, he and the ARM facility team deploy advanced atmospheric instruments to measure cloud structure, precipitation, and radiation.

Through Jensen’s mentorship, students see what atmospheric science looks like in practice. They learn about tools used in the field, such as radars and weather balloons, analyze datasets using coding and visualization tools like Python, and participate in exciting moments when new insights emerge from their data.

Jensen’s mentorship goes beyond helping students leave internships with new skills in data science and experimental analysis, said Aleida Pérez, manager of Brookhaven’s Office of Workforce Development and Science Education.

“He makes sure students are engaged with the broader network of atmospheric science researchers, helping them understand the impact of the research they collaborate on and see themselves as part of the research community,” Pérez said.

Jensen said he and his colleagues encourage students to embrace trial-and-error, whether they’re trying out ideas for experiments or exploring career pathways.

“We talk to them a lot about not being fearful of the research they’re doing and to go ahead and try new things,” Jensen said.

Those who nominated Jensen for the DOE award cited his accessibility, patience, and ability to instill confidence in aspiring scientists.

“To say that Mike had an impact on my life and career would be a severe understatement,” said Diana Apoznanski, a mentee of Jensen’s through HSRP and SULI. “Mike molded a timid high school student who had an interest in weather into a confident Ph.D. candidate studying Earth system modeling and impacts, and he has consistently and enthusiastically supported my career for an entire decade.”

Apoznanski is now pursuing a Ph.D. in atmospheric science at Rutgers University.

Jensen has also served as a mentor to new mentors, inspiring early-career researchers in his department to step into mentoring roles, Pérez said.

“He has supported his colleagues by serving as a co-mentor, providing guidance, and sharing what he has learned from collaborating with many students who have continued in STEM fields,” Pérez said.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

Follow @BrookhavenLab on social media. Find us on Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Facebook.

 

Journal Link: Physical Review Letters, 135 091401 (2025)

Newswise — UPTON, N.Y. — Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory developed a new machine learning framework that can accelerate the search for better catalysts  — the materials that speed up chemical reactions — and offer more reliable results.

Finding high-performing catalysts, which are used to accelerate processes from chemical manufacturing to energy production, can be a slow, expensive process, often relying on years of trial-and-error or massive computational resources. To add to the difficulty, ideal catalyst candidates are rare.

“Imagine driving somewhere new without using GPS,” said Brookhaven Lab chemist Wenjie Liao. “You’ll probably get there eventually, but you’ll take long detours and waste time. The discovery of catalysts can be like that.”

Researchers in the Catalysis Reactivity and Structure group in Brookhaven Lab’s Chemistry Division tackled those discovery challenges with a new multi-layer machine learning approach that screens catalysts step by step, mimicking how scientists evaluate performance in real experiments.

The team successfully used the chemical conversion of carbon dioxide (CO₂) to methanol — a type of alcohol that can be used as fuel — as a case study for the new approach, which outperformed conventional models. The study also shed new light on how scientists can control key chemical reactions steps that tune two important features that make for an effective catalyst in that process: activity and selectivity.

A paper describing their work was recently published in Chem Catalysis.

The best catalysts must be active enough to drive reactions efficiently, but selective enough to favor the desired product over unwanted byproducts.

“Highly active and selective catalysts save energy and costs,” said Brookhaven Lab chemist Ping Liu, who is also an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University. “An active catalyst means it doesn’t require high pressure or high temperatures to speed up a reaction, and a selective catalyst means it doesn’t require purification, which can be costly, to get the product you want.”

Machine learning models promise faster catalyst discovery, but they face hurdles that the Brookhaven scientists set out to overcome in their study. Existing single-layer models have been limited by high costs to generate large databases needed for analysis, low data quality and uneven spread of data, the researchers said. Additionally, conventional models have not been trained with a chemical understanding to make accurate predictions about catalysts.

“Simpler one-layer models overlook the domain expertise need to reliably predict a good catalyst,” Liu said. “Based on all these limitations, we developed a multi-layer binary machine learning approach that targets complex reaction networks for real catalysis, which has never been considered before in this kind of model.”

Case study: turning CO₂ into methanol

Instead of asking a single model to predict catalyst performance all at once, the Brookhaven team’s method breaks the problem into a series of simpler decisions. To test their approach, the researchers studied the performance of copper-based catalysts used to convert CO₂ into methanol.

The researchers trained multiple models using synthetic datasets generated from kinetic Monte Carlo simulations, which meant for a low computational cost, according to the study. These simulations capture how chemical reactions unfold over time, including competition between multiple reaction pathways — an important feature often missing from simpler models.

“This helps improve the accuracy and reliability of the model,” said An Nguyen, a visiting graduate student from Stony Brook University. “Each layer is related to how we think about catalysts as chemists, how we break it in down into different categories with chemical or catalysis understanding.”

In their case study, the researchers’ multi-layer approach asked whether a catalyst could drive the reaction to convert CO₂ to methanol, a desired product, and if it performed as well as — or even better than — the copper-based catalyst widely used in industrial and academic applications.

Applying the new framework, the team successfully screened catalyst designs that were both more active and more selective than copper catalysts. The method consistently outperformed conventional single-layer machine learning models, which struggled to find rare, high-performing candidates.

The framework also revealed which reaction steps mattered most. The analysis showed that transitions between competing reaction pathways — rather than individual steps alone — play a critical role in controlling both activity and selectivity.

“The multilayer approach allows us to dig deeper into the understanding between what we identified as key features and reaction behaviors,” Liu said. “We identified key steps that control both the activity and selectivity for CO₂ to methanol, providing new insight into this process.”

The process of converting CO₂ into methanol, known as hydrogenation, is already a commercial process. This work could be a step towards improving the workflow for industry partners, the researchers said. The framework can be adapted to other processes.

To develop the new framework, the researchers used computational resources from the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Brookhaven; the Scientific Computing and Data Facilities at Brookhaven; and SeaWulf, a high-performance computing cluster at Stony Brook University.

The research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

Follow @BrookhavenLab on social media. Find us on Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Facebook.

BYLINE: Michelle Alvarez

For Immediate Release_

March 23, 2026
Contact: Michelle Alvarez
malvarez@jlab.org

A Strong Case for Weak Interactions

Jefferson Lab physicist Ciprian Gal wins prestigious DOE award to search for cracks in physics’ best theory of the universe

Newswise — NEWPORT NEWS, VA – In fifth grade, Ciprian Gal received his physics textbook a year early. The book promised to explain everything, and young Gal believed it. “I was bragging to all my friends, look at this book. It tells you everything,” Gal said. “And I’m going to know everything about it.” Decades later, Gal, a staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, is still chasing answers. His work probing the fundamental forces that hold matter together earned him a DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Award. The five-year, $2.75 million award will fund personnel and research expenses related to Gal’s work on the Measurement of a Lepton-Lepton Electroweak Reaction (MOLLER) experiment. MOLLER aims to test whether the Standard Model of Particle Physics, scientists’ current best description of how particles interact, is actually complete. Measuring Weak Charge The Standard Model explains three of the four fundamental forces that govern the universe: electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. Gal’s research focuses on the measurement of the electron’s weak charge, a property that describes how electrons interact through the weak force. While physicists understand the weak force reasonably well, measuring its precise effects on electrons requires extraordinary precision. The MOLLER experiment will scatter electrons off other electrons in a hydrogen target. It will measure tiny differences in how they scatter depending on the electron’s spin direction. These differences are so tiny, estimated to be 35 parts per billion, that measuring them requires utmost accuracy and control over every aspect of the experiment. “It’s a precision measurement,” Gal said. “We need to know exactly what we’re measuring, down to very fine details.” The challenge extends beyond just taking measurements. Gal and his team must account for every possible source of uncertainty, from the quantum mechanics of how particles scatter to the precise geometry of their detector. Abhay Deshpande, who mentored Gal during his graduate studies at Stony Brook University and now collaborates with him on MOLLER, attributes this precision mindset to Gal’s fundamental approach to physics. “His penchant for precision and methodical approach makes him particularly suited to this exacting research,” said Deshpande, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s associate lab director for nuclear and particle physics and Stony Brook University distinguished professor of physics. The new measurements could indicate new particles or forces that physicists haven’t discovered yet. These deviations could help answer some of physics’ biggest mysteries: Why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? What is dark matter made of? “Whether we confirm the Standard Model’s predictions or find something unexpected, this measurement will be a major step forward,” Gal said. “Either result will teach us something fundamental about how the universe works.” A Decade of Physics at Jefferson Lab Gal’s connection to Jefferson Lab began in 2014, long before he joined the staff. Immediately after earning his Ph.D., he came to the lab as a University of Virginia (UVA) postdoc, drawn by the facility’s unique capabilities for studying the internal structure of protons and neutrons. Over the next eight years, Gal worked at the lab through partnerships with UVA, Stony Brook University and Mississippi State University. Each position as a research assistant professor helped him develop his skills in precision measurements and experimental design. In 2023, he joined Jefferson Lab as a staff scientist in Experimental Halls A/C. Throughout his career, Gal worked closely with mentors who shaped his approach to physics and collaboration. “At this point, Cip is one of the leading mid-career experts on all things relevant to the MOLLER experiment,” said Krishna Kumar, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst professor of physics and MOLLER spokesperson. “As we pivot to data collection and physics analysis, I expect he will be one of the leaders of the team driving the analysis to accomplish the goals of the experiment.” For Gal, that leadership potential stems directly from his commitment to teamwork. “The research that I want to do and the things that I want to discover can’t be done without collaboration, not only with experimental and theoretical physicists here at the lab, but also at the universities,” Gal said.

Looking Forward The DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program, established in 2010, supports outstanding scientists at a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility within 12 years of having earned their doctorate degree across disciplines including nuclear physics. The program aims to support the vision, creativity and effort of early career faculty to drive innovation in the basic science enterprise. For Gal, the award provides resources and time to tackle MOLLER’s technical challenges and prepare for the experiment’s data collection phase. “Cip is a fantastic collaborator,” said Kumar. “He communicates effectively regardless of the audience, and the fact that he acknowledges the need for collaboration demonstrates his maturity and potential for leadership.” Beyond the immediate research, Gal sees the award as validation of his approach: combining precision measurement techniques with innovative detector design to push the boundaries of what physics can reveal about nature’s fundamental workings. It also validates something simpler: persistence. “I think for these very competitive awards, it matters a lot to be able to stand out, to have something that is unique on its own,” Gal said. He applied in 2024, received feedback, refined his proposal, and won on his second attempt in 2025. “Ciprian thrives on difficult tasks,” said Deshpande. “He understands not only the award’s value to his own career but, more importantly, the visibility this recognition brings to the MOLLER project and Jefferson Lab. His persistence therefore does not surprise me, and I am delighted by his success.” For researchers working at the frontier of nuclear physics, success often means spending years preparing for measurements that take only hours or days to complete. The payoff comes when those measurements reveal something unexpected, a crack in our understanding that points toward deeper truths. Gal’s work on MOLLER continues that tradition, using precision as a tool to probe whether the Standard Model tells the whole story or whether the universe has more secrets waiting to be discovered. For a scientist who once believed a single book could explain everything, the possibility of discovering something entirely new might be even better than having all the answers.

Further Reading

https://moller-docdb.physics.sunysb.edu/cgi-bin/DocDBTest/public/ShowDocument?docid=998

https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.109.024323

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10267

Contact: Michelle Alvarez, Jefferson Lab Communications Office, malvarez@jlab.org

-end-

Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. JSA is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, Inc. (SURA).

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit