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Brookhaven National Lab

Esther Takeuchi with photo in the background of her with President Obama, when she won the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Photo courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

By Daniel Dunaief

Pop them in the back of a cell phone and they work, most of the time. Sometimes, they only do their job a short time, discharge or generate so much heat that they become a hazard, much to the disappointment of the manufacturers and the consumers who bought electronic device.

Esther Takeuchi, a SUNY distinguished professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering and the chief scientist in the Energy Sciences Directorate at Brookhaven National Laboratory leads a team of scientists who are exploring what makes one battery work while another falters or fails. She is investigating how to improve the efficiency of batteries so they can deliver more energy as electricity.

Esther Takeuchi with a device that allows her to test batteries under various conditions to see how they function. Photo courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

The process of manufacturing batteries and storing energy is driven largely by commercial efforts in which companies put the ingredients together in ways that have, up until now, worked to produce energy. Scientists like Takeuchi, however, want to know what’s under the battery casing, as ions and electrons move beneath the surface to create a charge.

Recently, Takeuchi and a team that includes her husband Kenneth Takeuchi and Amy Marschilok, along with 18 postdoctoral and graduate students, made some progress in tackling energy storage activity in iron oxides.

These compounds have a mixed track record among energy scientists. That, Takeuchi said, is what attracted her and the team to them. Studying the literature on iron oxides, her graduate students discovered “everything from, ‘it looks terrible’ to, ‘it looks incredibly good,’” she said. “It is a challenging system to study, but is important to understand.”

This offered promise, not only in finding out what might make one set of iron oxides more effective in holding a charge without generating heat — the energy-robbing by-product of these reactions — but also in providing a greater awareness of the variables that can affect a battery’s performance.

In addition to determining how iron oxides function, Takeuchi would like to “determine whether these [iron oxides] can be useful and workable.” Scientists working with iron oxides didn’t know what factors to control in manufacturing their prospective batteries.

Takeuchi said her group is focusing on the linkage between small-scale and mesoscale particles and how that influences battery performance. “The benefit of iron oxides is that they are fairly inexpensive, are available, and are nontoxic,” she said, and they offer the potential of high energy content. They are related to rust in a broad sense. They could, theoretically, contain 2.5 times more energy than today’s batteries. “By understanding the fundamental mechanisms, we can move forward to understand their limitations,” she said, which, ultimately, could result in making these a viable energy storage material. T

akeuchi is also looking at a manganese oxide material in which the metal center and the oxygen connect, creating a tube-like structure, which allows ions to move along a track. When she started working with this material, she imagined that any ion that got stuck would cause reactions to stop, much as a stalled car in the Lincoln Tunnel leads to long traffic delays because the cars behind the blockage have nowhere to go.

Takeuchi said the ions don’t have the same problems as cars in a tunnel. She and her team believe the tunnel walls are porous, which would explain why something that looks like it should only produce a result that’s 5 percent different instead involves a process that’s 80 percent different. “These escape points are an interesting discovery, which means the materials have characteristics that weren’t anticipated,” Takeuchi said. The next step, she said, is to see if the researchers can control the technique to tune the material and make it into the constructs that take advantage of this more efficient flow of ions.

Through a career that included stops in Buffalo and North Carolina and West Virginia, Takeuchi, who has over 150 patents to her name, has collected numerous awards and received considerable recognition. She won the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, a presidential award given at a ceremony in the West Wing of the White House. Takeuchi developed compact lithium batteries for implantable cardiac defibrillators.

Takeuchi is currently a member of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation Nomination Evaluation Committee, which makes recommendations for the medal to the president. Scientists who have known Takeuchi for years applaud the work she and her team are doing on Long Island. “Dr. Takeuchi and her research group are making great advances in battery research that are very clearly promoted by the strong relationship between Stony Brook and BNL,” said Steven Suib, the director of the Institute for Materials Science at the University of Connecticut.

Indeed, at BNL, Takeuchi has used the National Synchrotron Light Source II, which became operational last year. The light source uses extremely powerful X-rays to create incredibly detailed images. She has worked with three beamlines on her research. At the same time, Takeuchi collaborates with researchers at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at BNL.

Although she works with real-world experiments, Takeuchi partners with scientists at Stony Brook, BNL and Columbia University who focus on theoretical possibilities, offering her an insight into what might be happening or be possible. There are times when she and her team have observed some interaction with batteries, and she’s asked the theorists to help rationalize her finding. Other times, theorists have suggested what experimentalists should search for in the lab.

A resident of South Setauket, Takeuchi and her husband enjoy Long Island beaches. Even during the colder weather, they bundle up and enjoy the coastline. “There’s nothing more mentally soothing and energizing” than going for a long walk on the beach, she said.

In her research, Takeuchi and her team are focused on understanding the limitations of battery materials. Other battery experts believe her efforts are paying dividends. Suib said the recent work could be “very important in the development of new, inexpensive battery materials.”

A boy looks through the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab during an event meant to examine the birth of the universe July 31. Photo from BNL

By Colm Ashe

Hundreds of North Shore residents gathered at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton July 31 for the last Summer Sunday of the season, a program which offers the public a chance to immerse themselves in the wide range of scientific endeavors that take place at the lab.

The final Summer Sunday’s events focused on a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The RHIC is the modern culmination of an age-old inquiry into the origins of the universe and the only operating particle collider in the United States.

The day’s events gave the public a chance to witness the enormity of the project, a size measured not only in square mileage, but also in international collaborators. Thousands of scientists from all over the world, even those on opposite sides of warring nations, have been brought together by this quest to unlock the secrets of matter.

The RHIC re-creates an explosion similar to the one that created the universe. Photo from BNL
The RHIC re-creates an explosion similar to the one that created the universe. Photo from BNL

From the main control room, scientists at BNL send ions spinning around a 2.5-mile circular track and smash them together at a velocity close to the speed of light. When the ions collide, they create a small explosion that lasts for an extremely brief time span—one billionth of one billionth of one one millionth of a second.

During the explosion, scientists get a finite window into the birth of the universe, measuring one billionth of one millionth of a meter across. In order to study this small speck of short-lived matter, the remnants of these collisions are recorded in two detectors, STAR and PHENIX. This data is then examined by some of world’s top minds.

According to Physicist Paul Sorensen, this collision re-creates “the conditions of the early universe” so scientists can “study the force that holds together that matter as well as all of the matter that exists in the visible universe today.”

What is this force that binds the universe together? At the event, renowned physicist and deputy chair of BNL’s physics department Howard Gordon addressed this puzzling question. His lecture provided the audience some background on the history of this quest, as well as an update on the discovery of the elusive particle that started it all—the Higgs boson.

Though theories regarding the Higgs field — a field of energy presumed to give particles their mass — have been around since the 1960s, it took five decades to finally find the Higgs boson. As reported by TBR’s very own Daniel Dunaief, this “God particle” was finally discovered in 2012 at Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s first ever particle accelerator.

This was the puzzle piece scientists worldwide had been counting on to validate their theory about the origins of matter. According to Gordon, “atoms, therefore life, would not form without the Higgs boson.”

Since this discovery, a vast global network of scientists and centers, including BNL, has been created to sift through the enormous amount of data generated by the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC produces enough data “to fill more than 1,000 one-terabyte hard drives — more than the information in all the world’s libraries,” according to theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss.

After Gordon’s lecture, some of the most promising physicists in the U.S. led guests on a tour of the facilities which process this data, along with an up-close introduction to RHIC, STAR and PHENIX, all of which are undergoing maintenance this summer.

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An image from the Biomass Burn Observation Project. Photo from Arthur Sedlacek

The search for small particles has taken Arthur Sedlacek to places like thick plumes of smoke above wildfires raging in the western United States to picturesque vistas on Ascension Island, a staging area for the Allies for antisubmarine activities during World War II.

A chemist in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Sedlacek is studying aerosols, which are tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere. These particles can form the nuclei of clouds. Depending on their color, they can also either heat or cool the atmosphere.

“White” aerosols, as Sedlacek put it, such as sulfate- or nitrate-based particles, reflect solar radiation, while “black” aerosols, such as soot, absorb the sun’s light and help trap that energy in the atmosphere. By absorbing heat, darker aerosols increase the temperature, while lighter particles reflect some of that heat back into space.

“When you talk about climate change, you identify greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide, which is responsible for warming,” Sedlacek said. “When you run through the model calculations, the models overpredict what we should see. Either something is wrong with the models or something else is counterbalancing the warming effect.”

Arthur Sedlacek photo from Sedlacek
Arthur Sedlacek photo from Sedlacek

Indeed, aerosols represent part of that something else. “We need to incorporate them into our models to better understand what we actually observe in the field,” Sedlacek said. He studies the types of particles, how they age, their color, changes in their color and whether they can act as cloud condensation nuclei.

“We want to understand what’s being produced and how it changes as the plume dilutes and gets older,” Sedlacek said. “How this aging alters the microphysical and optical [properties are] very important to quantifying the contribution of aerosol to climate change.”

During the summer and fall of 2013, Sedlacek was a part of a study called the Biomass Burn Observation Project, which included 14 scientists from seven institutions. Other BNL scientists included his co-principal investigator and chemist Larry Kleinman, atmospheric scientist Ernie Lewis, chemist Stephen Springston and tenured scientist Jian Wang.

Sedlacek spent several hours preparing the equipment that would gather data above these raging fires.

The planes flew into the smoke and then moved in the direction of the smoke, measuring the changes in these aerosols an hour, two hours and more away from the fire. These measurements showed how these aerosols changed over time.

While the study was conducted several years ago, Sedlacek and his colleagues are still working to put together the information.

They have learned that the particles in the air change dramatically in the first few hours. Biomass burning events produce aerosols that are considered “brown carbon” because they are not black, like soot, but they aren’t white like a sulfate- or nitrate-containing aerosol.

Brown carbon is known to evolve. They also observed a particle type referred to as “tar balls.” While others have seen these, Sedlacek and his colleagues are the first to show that they behave like secondary organic aerosols.

The description of these tar balls isn’t meant to suggest boulder-sized pieces of tar hiding somewhere in the clouds: They are about 250 nanometers in diameter, which makes them about 240 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

The group is trying to understand how these tar balls form. These tar balls may help clarify a sampling mystery. The top-down view, from satellites, suggests something different than the bottom-up view, from collecting data from particles. The satellite views indicate there should be more “stuff” in the air.

The bottom-up view may not take these tar balls into account. Not all wildfires produce tar balls, but the data Sedlacek and his collaborators collected suggest that they could represent 20 to 30 percent of the particulate mass in the plume.

In addition to flying above wildfires, Sedlacek also jets to places around the world including Brazil and Ascension Island.

He is also a mentor for two instruments, which means he is responsible for making sure they are functioning. He works with single-particle soot photometers, which measure the amount of black carbon in the air, and the aethalometer, which uses light transmission to determine the concentration of black carbon particles collected on a filter.

With the single-particle soot photometer, Sedlacek looked “at the data in a new way and from that gained insight into the morphology — the shape — of the individual particles, something that nobody had thought to do previously,” Lewis explained in an email. Lewis, who has known Sedlacek for over 10 years and has collaborated on numerous projects, said that Sedlacek is “wonderful to work with” and is a “very careful scientist with keen insight and great attention to detail.”

On Ascension Island, Sedlacek was a mentor in support of another scientist’s field campaign. That effort is exploring how biomass burning aerosols produced in Africa interact with marine clouds as the air mass moves from the west coast of Africa in the general direction of the island.

A photographer and bicyclist, Sedlacek takes numerous pictures of his work.

Sedlacek describes himself as an experimentalist and an observationist. He does not do any of the climate models. His data, however, informs those models and enables other scientists to include more details about the climate and atmosphere.

“Those of us who love to fly get to fly into these plumes,” where they are in an unpressurized cabin, so the outside air makes its way into the plane, he said. They experience considerable turbulence above these fires.

“When we see our instruments and our senses respond at the same time,” he said, “it makes for an unforgettable experience.”

Rainbow over NSLS-II: Brookhaven National Laboratory’s National Synchrotron Light Source II is a state-of-the-art 3-GeV electron storage ring. Photo from BNL

Budget season brought good news for the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which may receive $291.5 million from the government to help sustain and improve two of its facilities as part of President Barack Obama’s budget request for the 2017 fiscal year.

The president requested $179.7 million of that money to go toward BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider facility and the remainder to the National Synchrotron Light Source II facility. The proposed amount is $9.5 million more than what the lab received last year for the two facilities combined.

According to Brookhaven Lab spokesperson Peter Genzer, the money won’t only help the Lab’s RHIC and NSLS-II facilities run, but also help fund new experimental stations at NSLS-II. The president’s financial inquiry also includes $1.8 million for the Core Facility Revitalization project.

The project will provide the infrastructure and facilities to store data to support the lab’s growing needs, the press release said.

U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have worked to maintain America’s science presence — and securing more federal funds for the lab helps maintain it. Schumer said he was pleased with the president’s request to increase funding for the lab, saying that an increase in funding will help keep BNL and our nation at the forefront of innovation and boost Long Island’s economy.

“We appreciate the President’s continued support for science and, in particular, Brookhaven Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and National Synchrotron Light Source II,” BNL Director Doon Gibbs said. “ We are also extremely grateful for the ongoing efforts of Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand — and the entire N.Y. Congressional delegation — on behalf of the Lab and its research mission.”

According to RHIC’s website, scientists study earth in its infancy and other areas that will help people better understand how the world works. The approximate 16-year-old ion collider is also the first machine in the world that can support colliding heavy ions.

The NSLS-II allows scientists to examine high-energy light waves in a variety of spectrums, including x-ray, ultraviolet and infrared. The RHIC and NSLS-II are BNL’s two largest facilities Genzer said.

He added that the “president’s budget request is the first step in the budget process for the fiscal year 2017.” The process begins on Oct. 1. In the best-case scenario, the government will agree on and vote to approve the final budget before the end of the end of September.

The senators will continue their fight to get increased funding for BNL as the lab “is a major economic engine for Long Island,” Gillibrand said.

Gillibrand said she was also pleased with the administration’s request for increased funds. Construction of NSLS-II began in 2009 and cost around $912 million. BNL expected construction to end last year.

Other members of BNL were unavailable for comment prior to publication.

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BNL’s Peter Guida with Daniela Trani, a summer school student at the NASA Space Radiation Lab. Photo from BNL

Ferdinand Magellan didn’t have the luxury of sending a machine into the unknown around the world before he took to the seas. Modern humans, however, dispatch satellites, rovers and orbiters into the farthest reaches of the universe. Several months after the New Horizons spacecraft beamed back the first close-up images of Pluto from over three billion miles away, NASA confirmed the presence of water on Mars.

The Mars discovery continues the excitement over the possibility of sending astronauts to the Red Planet as early as the 2030s.

Before astronauts can take a journey between planets that average 140 million miles apart, scientists need to figure out the health effects of prolonged exposure to damaging radiation.

Each year, liaison biologist Peter Guida at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) at Brookhaven National Laboratory coordinates the visits of over 400 scientists to a facility designed to determine, among other things, what radiation does to the human body and to find possible prevention or treatment for any damage.

Guida is working to “improve our understanding of the effects that space radiation from cosmic rays have on humans,” explained Michael Sivertz, a physicist at the same facility. “He would like to make sure that voyages to Mars do not have to be one-way trips.”

Guida said radiation induces un-repaired and mis-repaired DNA damage. Enough accumulated mutations can cause cancer. Radiation also induces reactive oxygen species and produces secondary damage that is like aging.

The results from these experiments could provide insights that lead to a better understanding of diseases in general and may reveal potential targets for treatment.

This type of research could help those who battle cancer, neurological defects or other health challenges, Guida said.

By observing the molecular changes tissues and cells grown in the lab undergo in model systems as they transition from healthy to cancerous, researchers can look to protect or restore genetic systems that might be especially vulnerable.

If the work done at the NSRL uncovers some of those genetic steps, it could also provide researchers and, down the road, doctors with a way of using those genes as predictors of cancer or can offer guidance in tailoring individualized medical treatment based on the molecular signature of a developing cancer, Guida suggested.

Guida conducts research on neural progenitor cells, which can create other types of cells in the nervous system, such as astrocytes. He also triggers differentiation in these cells and works with mature neurons. He has collaborated with Roger M. Loria, a professor in microbiology and immunology at Virginia Commonwealth University, on a compound that reverses the damage from radiation on the hematological, or blood, system.

The compound can increase red blood cells, hemoglobin and platelet counts even after exposure to some radiation. It also increases monocytes and the number of bone marrow cells. A treatment like this might be like having the equivalent of a fire extinguisher nearby, not only for astronauts but also for those who might be exposed to radiation through accidents like Fukushima or Chernobyl or in the event of a deliberate act.

Loria is conducting tests for Food and Drug Administration approval, Guida said.

If this compound helps astronauts, it might also have applications for other health challenges, although any other uses would require careful testing.

While Guida conducts and collaborates on research, he spends the majority of his time ensuring that the NSRL is meeting NASA’s scientific goals and objectives by supporting the research of investigators who conduct their studies at the site. He and a team of support personnel at NSRL set up the labs and equipment for these visiting scientists. He also schedules time on the beam line that generates ionizing particles.

Guida is “very well respected within the space radiation community, which is why he was chosen to have such responsibility,” said Sivertz, who has known Guida for a decade.

Guida and his wife Susan, a therapist who is in private practice, live in Searingtown.

While Guida recalls making a drawing in crayon after watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon, he didn’t seek out an opportunity at BNL because of a long-standing interest in space. Rather, his scientific interest stemmed from a desire to contribute to cancer research.

When he was 15, his mother Jennie, who was a seamstress, died after a two-year battle with cancer. Guida started out his career at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he hoped to make at least the “tiniest contribution” to cancer research.

He pursued postdoctoral research at BNL to study the link between mutations, radiation and cancer.

Guida feels as if he’s contributed to cancer research and likes to think his mother is proud of him. “Like a good scientist,” though, he said he’s “never satisfied. Good science creates the need to do more good science. When you find something out, that naturally leads to more questions.”

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Eric Stach, group leader of Electron Microscopy at BNL and Special Assistant for Operando Experimentation for the Energy Sciences Directorate. Photo from BNL

In a carpool, one child might be the slowest to get ready, hunting for his second sneaker, putting the finishing touches on the previous night’s homework, or taming a gravity-defying patch of hair. For that group, the slowest child is the rate-limiting step, dictating when everyone arrives at school.

Similarly, chemical reactions have a rate-limiting step, in which the slower speed of one or more reactions dictates the speed and energy needed for a reaction. Scientists use catalysts to speed up those slower steps.

In the world of energy conversion, where experts turn biomass into alcohol, knowing exactly what happens with these catalysts at the atomic level, can be critical to improving the efficiency of the process. A better and more efficient catalyst can make a reaction more efficient and profitable.

That’s where Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Eric Stach enters the picture. The group leader of Electron Microscopy, Stach said there are several steps that are rate-limiting in converting biomass to ethanol.

By using the electron microscope at Center for Functional Nanomaterials, Stach can get a better structural understanding of how the catalysts work and find ways to make them even more efficient.

“If you could lower the energy cost” of some of the higher-energy steps, “the overall system becomes more efficient,” Stach said.

Studying catalysts as they are reacting, rather than in a static way, provides “tremendous progress that puts BNL and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at the center” of an important emerging ability, said Emilio Mendez, the director of CFN. Looking at individual atoms that might provide insight into ways to improve reactions in energy conversion and energy storage is an example of a real impact Stach has had, Mendez said.

Stach works in a variety of areas, including Earth-abundant solar materials, and battery electrodes, all in an effort to see the structure of materials at an atomic scale.

“I literally take pictures of other people’s materials,” Stach said, although the pictures are of electrons rather than of light.

Stach, who has been working with electron microscopes for 23 years, gathers information from the 10-foot tall microscope, which has 25 primary lenses and numerous smaller lenses that help align the material under exploration.

His work enables him to see how electrons, which are tiny, negatively charged particles, bounce or scatter as they interact with atoms. These interactions reveal the structure of the test materials. When these electrons collide with a gold atom, they bounce strongly, but when they run into a lighter hydrogen or oxygen atom, the effect is smaller.

Since Stach arrived at BNL in 2010, he and his staff have enabled the number of users of the electron microscope facility to triple, estimated Mendez.

“The program has grown because of his leadership,” Mendez said. “He was instrumental in putting the group together and in enlarging the group. Thanks to him, directly or indirectly, the program has thrived.”

Lately, working with experts at the newly-opened National Synchrotron Light Source II, Stach, among other researchers, is looking in real time at changes in the atomic structure of materials like batteries.

In February, Stach was named Special Assistant for Operando Experimentation for the Energy Sciences Directorate.

“The idea is to look at materials while they are performing,” he said. Colleagues at the NSLS-II will shoot a beam of x-rays through the battery to “see where the failure points are,” he said. At the same time, Stach and his team will confirm and explore the atomic-scale structure of materials at Electron Microscopy.

Working with batteries, solar cells, and other materials suits Stach, who said he “likes to learn new things frequently.”

Residents of Setauket, Stach and his wife Dana Adamson, who works at North Shore Montessori School, have an 11-year old daughter, Gwyneth, and a nine year-old son, Augustus. The family routinely perambulates around Melville Park with their black lab, Lola.

In his work, Stach said he often has an idea of the structure of a material when he learns about its properties or composition, even before he uses the electron microscope. “The more interesting [moments] are when you get it wrong,” he said. “That’s what indicates something fundamentally new is going on, and that’s what’s exciting.”