The tip of the ‘wing’ of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy
NASA photo
As part of its Summer Sunday series, Brookhaven National Laboratory is bringing science to the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Planetarium, 180 Little Neck Road, Centerport on July 17 with a program titled SPACE from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Join scientists from BNL as they discuss the wonders of the universe and take turns with hands-on experiences that show the different weights in different planetary gravities, explore craters of the moon, and more! Admission is free to the public until 2 p.m.
Visitors will have access to the grounds as well as exhibits in the Vanderbilt Mansion and Hall of Fishes marine museum. Seating for the scientific talks and Planetarium shows require reservations. Please click on any program segment below to reserve your seat.
10:00 am – “The Invisible Universe.” Scientist Steven Bellavia of Brookhaven Lab’s Collider-Accelerator Department will share his talk about the universe (45 minutes).
11:00 am – “Can We See the Flag on the Moon?” Scientist Steven Bellavia of Brookhaven Lab’s Collider-Accelerator Department will share his talk about the flag on the moon (45 minutes).
Noon – “One World, One Sky” Planetarium astronomy show (45 minutes). Elmo and Big Bird live in the United States and Hu Hu Zhu lives far away in China, but they discover they see the same stars at night.
1:00 pm – “A Guide to Galactic Cosmic Rays: Studying Space Particles at Brookhaven National Lab.” Scientist Jessica Gasparik of Brookhaven Lab’s NASA Space Radiation Laboratory will speak about galactic cosmic rays (45 minutes).
In left photo, Zhiyang Zhai, on the right, with John Shanklin and Jantana Keereetaweep; in right photo, Zhiyang Zhai with Hui Liu. Photos courtesy of BNL
By Daniel Dunaief
In a highly competitive national award process, the Department of Energy provides $2.5 million to promising researchers through Early Career Research Funding.
Recently, the DOE announced that Zhiyang Zhai, an associate biologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, was one of 83 scientists from around the country to receive this funding.
“Supporting talented researchers early in their career is key to fostering scientific creativity and ingenuity within the national research community,” DOE Office of Science Director Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, said in a statement.
Zhai, who has worked at BNL for 11 years, is studying a signaling protein called Target Of Rapamycin (TOR) kinase, which is important in the plant and animal kingdom.
He hopes to develop a basic understanding of the way this kinase reacts to different conditions, such as the presence of carbon, to trigger reactions in a plant, including producing oils through photosynthesis or making seeds.
Zhiyang Zhai. Photo from BNL
“Ancient systems like this evolve in different lineages (like plants and animals) to work differently and [Zhai] wants to find out the details of how it works in plants,” John Shanklin, chair of BNL’s Biology Department, explained in an email.
Zhai is trying to define which upstream signals interact with TOR and what the effects of those interactions are on TOR to learn how the kinase works.
He is hoping to get a clear idea of how different nodes interact and how signaling through carbon, nutrients and sunlight affects TOR kinase levels and its configuration.
Researchers may eventually use the knowledge of upstream regulators to reprogram responses by introducing enzymes that would cause the synthesis, or degradation, of upstream regulatory metabolites, Shanklin suggested.
This could be a way to “tune” the sensor kinase activity to increase the synthesis of storage compounds like oil and starch.
In the bigger picture, this type of research could have implications and applications in basic science that could enhance the production of renewable resources that are part of a net-zero carbon fuel strategy.
The DOE sponsors “basic science programs to discover how plants and other organisms convert and store carbon that will enable a transition towards a net zero carbon economy to reduce the use of fossil fuels,” Shanklin said.
In applying for the award, Zhai paid “tremendous attention” to what the DOE’s mission is in this area, Shanklin said. Zhai picked out a project that, if successful, will directly contribute to some of the goals of the DOE.
Through an understanding of the way TOR kinase works, Zhai hopes to provide more details about metabolism.
Structure and function
Jen Sheen, Professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School, conducted pioneering work on how TOR kinase regulates cell growth in plants in 2013. Since then, TOR has attracted attention from an increasing number of biologists and has become “a hot and rapidly-developing research direction in plant biology,” Zhai explained.
He hopes to study the structure of TOR using BNL’s Laboratory of Biomolecular Structure at the National Synchrotron Lightsource II.
Zhai, who hopes to purify the plant version of TOR, plans to study how upstream signaling molecules interact with and modify the structure of the enzyme.
He will also use the cryo-electron microscope to get a structure. He is looking at molecular changes in TOR in the presence or absence of molecules or compounds that biochemically bind to it.
Through this funded research, Zhai hopes to explain how signals such as carbon supply, nutrients and sunlight regulates cell growth.
Once he’s conducted his studies on TOR, Zhai plans to make mutants of TOR and test them experimentally to see if a new version, which Zhai described as “TOR 2.0,” has the anticipated effects.
Zhai is building on his experience with another regulatory kinase, called SnRK1, which is involved in energy signaling.
“His expertise in defining SnRK1’s mechanism ideally positions him to perform this work,” Shanklin said.
At this point, Zhai is focused on basic science. Other researchers will apply what he learns to the development of plants for commercial use.
A seminal moment anda call home
Zhai described the award as “very significant” for him. He plans to continue with his passionate research to explore the unknown.
He will use the funds to hire new postdoctoral researchers to build up his research team. He also hopes this award gives him increased visibility and an opportunity to add collaborators at BNL and elsewhere.
The funding will support part of Zhai’s salary as well as that of his staff. He will also purchase some new lab instruments and tap into the award to attend conferences and publish papers.
When he learned he had won the award, Zhai called his mother Ruiming, who lives in his native China. “She is so proud of me and immediately spread the good news to my other relatives in China,” Zhai recalled.
When Shanklin spoke with Zhai after the two had learned of the award, he said he had “never seen Zhai look happier.”Shanklin suggested that this is a “seminal moment” in a career that he expects will have other such milestones in the future.
A resident of Mt. Sinai, Zhai lives with his wife Hui Liu, who is a Research Associate in Shanklin’s group specializing in plant transformation, fatty acids and lipidomics analysis.The couple has two sons, nine-year-old Terence and three-year-old Steven.
As for his work, Zhai hopes it has broader implications.
“The knowledge of TOR signaling will provide us [with] tools to achieve hyperaccumulation of lipids in plant vegetative tissues, which is a promising source for renewable energy,” he said.
Paul Freimuth and co-author Feiyue Teng, a scientist in Brookhaven Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), at the light microscope used to image bacteria in this study. Photo from BNL
By Daniel Dunaief
Researchers regularly say they go wherever the science takes them. Sometimes, however, the results of their work puts them on a different path, addressing new questions.
So it was for Paul Freimuth, a biologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Freimuth was studying plant proteins of unknown function that he thought might play a role in the synthesis or modification of plant cell walls. The goal was to produce these proteins in bacteria or yeast to facilitate an understanding of the protein structures.
When he inserted plant genes into bacteria, however, one of those genes experienced a phase shift, producing a misfolded protein that, when produced in high enough quantities, killed the bacteria.
Working with several interns over the course of five years, as well as a few other principal investigators, Freimuth discovered that this protein had the same effect as antibiotics called aminoglycosides, which are the current treatment for some bacterial infections. He recently published the results of these studies in the journal Plos One.
Aminoglycosides enter the cell and cause ribosomes to create proteins in an error-prone mode, which kill the bacterial cells. The way these proteins kill the cells, however, remains a mystery. Antibiotic-treated cells produce numerous proteins, which makes determining the mechanism of action difficult.
The protein Freimuth studied mirrors the effect of treating cells with aminogylcosides. Researchers now have a protein they can study to determine the mechanism of cell killing.
To be sure, Freimuth said the current research is at an early stage, and is a long way from any application. He hopes this model will advance an understanding of how aberrant proteins kill cells. That information can enable the design of small molecule drugs that mimic the protein’s toxic effect. He believes it’s likely that this protein would be toxic if expressed in other bacteria and in higher cells, but he has not tested it yet.
With antibiotic resistance continuing to spread, including for aminoglycosides, Freimuth said the urgency to find novel ways to kill or inhibit bacterial growth selectively without harmful side effects has increased.
Aminoglycosides cause the ribosome to shift coding phases or to make other errors. The model toxic protein he studied resulted from the bacteria starting to translate amino acids at an internal position, which produced a new, and, as it turns out, toxic sequence of amino acids.
The phase-shifted gene contained a stop codon located just 49 codons from the start site, which means that the toxic protein only contained 48 amino acids, which is much shorter than the average of 250 to 300 amino acids in an E. coli protein.
Since the model toxic protein was gene-encoded rather than produced by an antibiotic-induced error in translation, Freimuth’s team were able to study the sequence basis for toxicity. The acutely toxic effect was dependent on an internal region 10 amino acids in length.
Narrowing down the toxic factor to such a small region could help facilitate future studies of the mechanism of action for this protein’s toxic effect.
Misread signal
Freimuth and his team discovered that the bacteria misread the genetic plant sequence the researchers introduced. The bacteria have a quality control mechanism that searches for these gibberish proteins, breaking them down and eliminating them before they waste resources from the bacteria or damage the cell.
When Freimuth raised the number of such misfolded proteins high enough, he and his colleagues overwhelmed the quality control system, which he believes happened because the misfolded protein affected the permeability of the cell membrane, opening up channels to allow ions to flood in and kill the cell.
He said it’s an open question whether the protein jams open existing channels or becomes directly incorporated into the membrane, compromising membrane stability.
He showed that cells become salt-sensitive, indicating that sodium ion concentration increases. At the same time, it is likely that essential metabolites are leaking out, depriving the cell of compounds it needs to survive.
Now that the bacteria has produced this protein, Freimuth can use various tools and techniques at BNL, including the X-ray beamlines for protein crystallography and the cryo electron microscope, which would provide ways to study the interaction of the protein with cell components. High resolution structures such as the ones he hopes to determine could be used to guide drug design.
Freimuth is in the process of applying for National Institutes of Health funding for additional research, which could help the NIH’s efforts to counter the increasing spread of antibiotic resistance.
Freimuth has worked at BNL since 1991. He and his wife Mia Jacob, who recently retired from her role in graphic design in Stony Brook University’s Office of Marketing and Communication, reside in East Setauket.
The couple’s daughter Erika, who lives in Princeton and recently got married, works at Climate Central as an editor and writer. Their son Andrew works in Port Jefferson at an investment firm called FQS Capital Partners.
When Freimuth is not working at the lab, he enjoys sailing, kayaking and canoeing. During the pandemic, he said he purchased a small sailboat, with which he has been dodging the ferry in Port Jefferson Harbor.
Originally from Middletown, Connecticut, Freimuth was interested in science from an early age. He particularly enjoyed a mycology class as an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut.
As for his unexpected research with this protein, the biologist is pleased with the support he received from Brookhaven National Laboratory.
He said BNL enabled him to address the biofuel problem from protein quality control, which is a new angle. “BNL appreciates that valuable ideas sometimes bubble up unexpectedly and the lab has ways to assist investigators in developing promising ideas,” he said.
Milinda Abeykoon, lead beamline scientist at Pair Distribution Function Beamline, NSLS-II, aligning a sample holder for high-speed measurements, 2019. Photo courtesy of BNL
By Melissa Arnold
Over the past 75 years, Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) in Upton has become an international hub for innovative research and problem-solving. Their hard work has led to advancements in energy, medicine, physics and more, as well as seven Nobel Prizes.
A scientist at a fast neutron chopper at the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor (BGRR), 1953. Photo courtesy of BNL
This year, the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook will celebrate the lab’s myriad achievements and explore their deep roots in the area. The new exhibit, titled Atoms to Cosmos: The Story of Brookhaven National Laboratory, opens April 21.
BNL and the Long Island Museum started working on ideas for a future exhibition back in 2018 with plans to open in April of 2020. But as with other museums, the pandemic led to a halt in operations.
In some ways, the rescheduled timing of the exhibit is better than their initial plans.
“While the exhibition was temporarily shelved, both the lab and the museum wanted very much to still make it happen. We had done so much work in advance and preparation for it in 2020, and so we really wanted to get back to this opportunity,” said Joshua Ruff, Deputy Director and Director of Collections and Interpretation for the Long Island Museum. “We are especially pleased we were able to do it now, as it fits nicely with the lab’s 75th anniversary celebration.”
Brookhaven National Laboratory was founded in 1947 at the former site of the U.S. Army’s Camp Upton, becoming the first large research facility in the Northeast. At the time, they were exploring peaceful ways to utilize atomic energy.
“The BNL site has been in federal ownership since 1917 when it became the location of Camp Upton. Before that, the site was used for the cordwood industry and there was a small farm near the eastern edge of what is now the lab,” explained Timothy Green, BNL’s Environmental Compliance Section manager. “After World War I, all of the buildings were sold at auction and the site sat empty until around 1934, when it was declared the Upton National Forest and the Civilian Conservation Corps started planting trees. At the end of World War II [and a second period as Camp Upton], the land was transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission and became Brookhaven National Laboratory.”
It took some time for local residents to adjust to having a laboratory in the area, Ruff said.
A Positron Emission Tomography Halo Scanner/Detector. Photo courtesy of BNL
“The lab has often been misunderstood in its past, in fact from its origins. Many Suffolk County residents were not entirely sure that atomic research was safe, nor did they fully understand the relevance and significance [of that research] to their lives,” he explained. “The lab devoted years of hard work and financial resources to strengthen public dialogue and communication, which the exhibition details.”
Today, the lab employs almost 3,000 people and spans 5,320 acres.
The exhibit is co-curated by Joshua Ruff and Long Island Museum curator Jonathan Olly. They’ve included more than 140 items that showcase the lab’s growth and varied discoveries from the 1950s to the present day. The Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington is lending four of the objects, including a 1,000-pound, 94-inch square magnet lamina from the Cosmotron, BNL’s first major particle accelerator.
Another 40 objects are coming directly from the lab. Their contribution includes equipment from their facilities, personal belongings of former director Maurice Goldhaber, and “Atoms for Peace,” a famous painting that came to symbolize the lab’s work in its early years.
“A lot of the scientific research at BNL over the years has involved [developing] and testing cutting edge technologies. When these machines are no longer useful they’re usually recycled. Fortunately we do have two examples in the exhibition of early PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanners, one from 1961 and another from 1981,” Olly said. “In the case of these early machines, the focus was on the brain — the machines used radiation sensors arranged in a ring to produce a picture of a slice of your brain. Brookhaven scientists have used this PET technology (specifically the PETT VI scanner in the exhibition) in studying drug and alcohol addiction, eating disorders, ADHD, aging, and neurodegenerative disorders. The 1961 version is a prototype that was never used on patients.”
Also on view are an original chalkboard from the Graphite Research Reactor that still has writing on it; a 7-foot window from a bubble chamber that helped track the paths of atomic particles; and a detector that aided BNL chemist Raymond Davis Jr. in his Nobel Prize-winning neutrino research.
Recently, the lab was a part of the ongoing effort to study and contain COVID-19. The exhibit will include a model of the virus, with the familiar spiky shape that’s become commonplace since the pandemic began.
“Scientists at the lab’s National Synchrotron Light Source II worked on imaging the virus and the proteins … that allowed it to attach to human cells. At the same time, BNL computer scientists began developing algorithms to evaluate existing chemicals and drugs that could potentially prevent infection. One past experiment by [BNL biophysicist] William Studier, the T7 expression system, ended up being critical to the rapid development of two of the vaccines,” Green said.
Both the Long Island Museum and BNL staff hope that visitors to the exhibit come away with a deeper interest in science and an appreciation for the lab’s work.
“There are 17 national laboratories scattered throughout the United States, and Long Islanders can be proud to have one in their backyard. Long Island children have been inspired to pursue careers in science as a result of attending educational programs at the lab during public visitor days dating back to the 1950s. And the lab is invested in addressing our real-world problems, whether the dangers posed by DDT on Long Island in the 1960s or COVID now. This summer BNL should be resuming their “Summer Sundays” visitor program, and I encourage everyone to visit the lab, walk around, talk to staff, and get a glimpse of our scientific present and future,” Olly said.
Atoms to Cosmos: The Story of Brookhaven National Lab is on view now through Oct. 16 in the Long Island Museum’s History Museum and Visitor Center’s Main Gallery, 1200 Rt. 25A, Stony Brook. Regular museum hours are Thursday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Masks are required at this time, though health and safety guidelines are subject to change Admission is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, and $5 for students 6 to 17 and college students with I.D. Children under six are admitted for free. Tickets are available at the door; pre-registration is not required. For more information visit longislandmuseum.org or call 631-751-0066.
Learn more about Brookhaven National Lab at www.BNL.gov.
This LINCATS map shows the hospitals, incubators and collaborative institutions that will be involved in the regional initiative to translate biomedical discoveries into clinical applications to improve health outcomes, address health disparities across communities, and educate the workforce.
The initiative, secured by Senator Schumer, will receive $10 million in federal funds
Stony Brook University will lead a new, innovative network of regional biomedical research institutions to accelerate translational research that will impact and advance clinical care for many physical and mental health conditions. Called the Long Island Network for Clinical and Translational Science (LINCATS), it will be headquartered at Stony Brook University. The initiative will be in collaboration with Brookhaven National Lab (BNL), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the Northport VA Medical Center. Central to LINCATS establishment is $10 million in federal funding secured by Senator Chuck Schumer and supported by Senator Gillibrand, part of Congress’ omnibus funding bill of which Long Island will receive some $50 million.
The overall mission of LINCATS is to accelerate the public health impact of research, especially for underserved communities across Long Island, by offering access to innovative and transformative research programs and educational services. To improve the health of Long Island’s three million-plus population, the bioscience collaborative will engage in work ranging from basic research and clinical trials, to addressing vulnerable populations and disparities, and incorporating innovative research and practices such as the use of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, telehealth, genotyping, proteomics, and engineering-driven medicine.
“I am incredibly grateful to Senator Schumer for securing such crucial funding for the establishment of the Long Island Network for Clinical and Translational Science (LINCATS) at Stony Brook University,” said Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis. “Through LINCATS, the entire Long Island community and the greater New York region will have access to a comprehensive health research network that is capable of a rapid response to emergent healthcare risks, including a future global pandemic. New York and the nation are fortunate to have such a visionary leader as Senator Schumer, who champions the cutting-edge science research and health innovation that will provide important and much-needed economic boosts to development on Long Island.”
The initial funding will help to scale-up operations of this research and healthcare service network, creating an ecosystem that will fast-track the application of new scientific discoveries in clinical medical care, helping to provide new treatments to more patients throughout Long Island.
“With renowned institutions like BNL, Cold Spring Harbor Lab, and Stony Brook University, Long Island is a hub for world-class scientific research and groundbreaking discoveries,” said Senator Chuck Schumer. “To bolster continued success and innovation, I worked to ensure that, as part of Congress’s historic bipartisan budget agreement, $10 Million will head to Stony Brook to help create the Long Island Network for Clinical and Translation Science. This federal funding will help scale-up operations of this research and healthcare service network, creating an ecosystem that will fast-track the application of new scientific discoveries in clinical medical care. Not only will LINCATS put Long Island on the map as a center of clinical healthcare research, it will help provide innovative new treatments to benefit more patients throughout the region.“
One specific aspect of the collaborative work will be researching and addressing diseases and environmental factors that are prevalent on Long Island, such as Lyme disease, emerging pathogens and environmental risks due to the impact of climate change on coastal resiliency, as well as the unique challenges related to opiate addiction.
“LINCATS is Stony Brook’s response to the National Institutes of Health’s call to action to create research hubs designed to expand and elevate the bench-to-bedside ecosystem within communities nationwide,” said Richard J. Reeder, PhD, Vice President for Research at Stony Brook University. “We are fully committed to supporting this prominent team of biomedical researchers and practitioners who are set to lead and deliver groundbreaking discoveries.”
LINCATS will also serve as a catalyst to create hundreds of new jobs in the bioscience sector, and potentially thousands of jobs when the infrastructure is fully operational. The network will provide a workforce of both scientists and clinicians from multiple institutions working in partnership with all communities across Long Island to address all health care challenges.
Anissa Abi-Dargham, MD, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Vice Chair for Research and the Lourie Endowed Chair in Psychiatry, will serve as the Principal Investigator and Director of LINCATS. The LINCATS leadership team at Stony Brook includes 17 members, virtually all of whom are prominent faculty scientists and medical scientists in multiple fields at the University, such as Pharmacological Sciences, Infectious Diseases, Biotechnology, and Public Health.
“I am extremely thankful for Senator Schumer’s support of LINCATS. The funds will allow us to deepen our investments in the infrastructure, training, and community engagement pillars necessary to fulfill the mission of LINCATS,” says Dr. Abi-Dargham. “I am also grateful for the team of scientists, educators and community members who worked with me to develop the large collaborative project, and for the assistance of the Office of Proposal Development under the direction of Nina Maung.”
When the program is officially in place, funds will also be used for core personnel, supplies and equipment, support for multidisciplinary research, and the construction of an inpatient research unit at Stony Brook Hospital for the purpose of translational and clinical biomedical research.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has awarded a $61.8 million contract to Plainview, NY-based E.W. Howell to build the Lab‘s new Science and User Support Center (SUSC). This new facility is part of a larger effort to redevelop an existing on-site apartment area near BrookhavenLab‘s entryway. General contractor E.W. Howell will oversee SUSC construction, planned to start in the first quarter of 2022.
With approximately 75,000 gross square feet, the SUSC will serve as a welcome center for guests, researchers, and facility users arriving at BrookhavenLab. It will offer modern, configurable conference space for scientists to collaborate and office areas for Lab employees.
The future Science and User Support Center
The SUSC is the first building planned for Discovery Park, a new vision for the gateway to BrookhavenLab. The concept for Discovery Park includes the potential for additional development on approximately 60 acres of previously used, publicly accessible land. The Lab is working, in coordination with DOE, on a process for developers, collaborators, and entrepreneurs to propose, build, and operate new facilities in Discovery Park. Future occupants will complement the DOE and BrookhavenLab missions, leveraging opportunities that result from close proximity to the Laboratory. Discovery Park will offer a flexible platform to advance science and technology-based economic development for Long Island, New York State, and beyond.
BrookhavenLab‘s 5,321-acre site is located north of the Long Island Expressway near Exit 68 and east of the William Floyd Parkway. The SUSC and Discovery Park will be built off William Floyd Parkway along the access road leading to BrookhavenLab‘s main entrance.
The selection of E.W. Howell as general contractor follows DOE’s decision on Sept. 13, 2021, approving a total project cost of $86.2 million and awarding the Lab‘s SUSC project team with “Critical Decision Three” (CD-3). CD-3 is the fourth major milestone in DOE’s five-step project management process. The SUSC project team—comprising staff from BrookhavenLab and the DOE’s local Brookhaven Site Office—and E.W. Howell are targeting summer 2024 for SUSC construction to be completed.
The SUSC was designed by Burns & McDonnell and Gensler, two U.S.-based international firms.
Significant investment supporting science and technology
The Science and User Support Center will serve as a welcome center for guests, researchers, and facility users arriving at Brookhaven Lab. It will offer modern, configurable conference space for scientists to collaborate and office areas for Lab employees.
“The Department of Energy’s investment in the Science and User Support Center reflects our commitment to science and technology for the nation. It represents a significant step towards moving Brookhaven National Laboratory’s outwardly facing organizations closer and more accessible to the public. DOE continues to support the SUSC to improve researchers’ access to the experts and capabilities offered at BrookhavenLab,” said Robert Gordon, manager of DOE’s local Brookhaven Site Office.
“Awarding this contract marks a major milestone in BrookhavenLab‘s efforts to improve experiences for staff, guests, and users, to modernize infrastructure, and increase the Laboratory’s overall impact,” said Jack Anderson, Deputy Director for Operations at the Lab. “We’re excited for the facility and for the scientific collaborations it will help facilitate.”
Future first destination for thousands of visiting scientists
More than 5,000 guests traveled to BrookhavenLab annually in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. The largest percentage came from institutions in New York State, but many came from across the country and around the world, attracted by the Lab‘s in-house experts and highly specialized research facilities for experiments. Those facilities include DOE Office of Science User Facilities such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, National Synchrotron Light Source II, and Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Guests also visited—sometimes hundreds at a time—for conferences, workshops, and other events to discuss scientific results and opportunities for future research.
Because of the ongoing pandemic, research collaborations are continuing with remote access and few guests traveling to BrookhavenLab. When it becomes safer for the Laboratory to return to more normal operations, many guests and facility users are expected to return to the Lab site. Upon completion, the SUSC will be their first destination on site upon arrival at the Laboratory.
The SUSC project is funded 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.
Members of the research team include: Daniel Mazzone (formerly of Brookhaven Lab, now at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland), Yao Shen (Brookhaven Lab), Gilberto Fabbris (Argonne National Laboratory), Hidemaro Suwa (University of Tokyo and University of Tennessee), Hu Miao (Oak Ridge National Laboratory—ORNL), Jennifer Sears* (Brookhaven Lab), Jian Liu (U Tennessee), Christian Batista (U Tennessee and ORNL), and Mark Dean (Brookhaven Lab). *Photo Credit: DESY, Marta Mayer
Scientists identify a long-sought magnetic state predicted 60 years ago
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a long-predicted magnetic state of matter called an “antiferromagnetic excitonic insulator.”
“Broadly speaking, this is a novel type of magnet,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist Mark Dean, senior author on a paper describing the research just published in Nature Communications. “Since magnetic materials lie at the heart of much of the technology around us, new types of magnets are both fundamentally fascinating and promising for future applications.”
The new magnetic state involves strong magnetic attraction between electrons in a layered material that make the electrons want to arrange their magnetic moments, or “spins,” into a regular up-down “antiferromagnetic” pattern. The idea that such antiferromagnetism could be driven by quirky electron coupling in an insulating material was first predicted in the 1960s as physicists explored the differing properties of metals, semiconductors, and insulators.
“Sixty years ago, physicists were just starting to consider how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to the electronic properties of materials,” said Daniel Mazzone, a former Brookhaven Lab physicist who led the study and is now at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland. “They were trying to work out what happens as you make the electronic ‘energy gap’ between an insulator and a conductor smaller and smaller. Do you just change a simple insulator into a simple metal where the electrons can move freely, or does something more interesting happen?”
The prediction was that, under certain conditions, you could get something more interesting: namely, the “antiferromagnetic excitonic insulator” just discovered by the Brookhaven team.
Why is this material so exotic and interesting? To understand, let’s dive into those terms and explore how this new state of matter forms.
In an antiferromagnet, the electrons on adjacent atoms have their axes of magnetic polarization (spins) aligned in alternating directions: up, down, up, down and so on. On the scale of the entire material those alternating internal magnetic orientations cancel one another out, resulting in no net magnetism of the overall material. Such materials can be switched quickly between different states. They’re also resistant to information being lost due to interference from external magnetic fields. These properties make antiferromagnetic materials attractive for modern communication technologies.
Next we have excitonic. Excitons arise when certain conditions allow electrons to move around and interact strongly with one another to form bound states. Electrons can also form bound states with “holes,” the vacancies left behind when electrons jump to a different position or energy level in a material. In the case of electron-electron interactions, the binding is driven by magnetic attractions that are strong enough to overcome the repulsive force between the two like-charged particles. In the case of electron-hole interactions, the attraction must be strong enough to overcome the material’s “energy gap,” a characteristic of an insulator.
“An insulator is the opposite of a metal; it’s a material that doesn’t conduct electricity,” said Dean. Electrons in the material generally stay in a low, or “ground,” energy state. “The electrons are all jammed in place, like people in a filled amphitheater; they can’t move around,” he said. To get the electrons to move, you have to give them a boost in energy that’s big enough to overcome a characteristic gap between the ground state and a higher energy level.
An artist’s impression of how the team identified this historic phase of matter. The researchers used x-rays to measure how spins (blue arrows) move when they are disturbed and were able to show that they oscillate in length in the pattern illustrated above. This special behavior occurs because the amount of electrical charge at each site (shown as yellow disks) can also vary and is the fingerprint used to pin down the novel behavior.
In very special circumstances, the energy gain from magnetic electron-hole interactions can outweigh the energy cost of electrons jumping across the energy gap.
Now, thanks to advanced techniques, physicists can explore those special circumstances to learn how the antiferromagnetic excitonic insulator state emerges.
A collaborative team worked with a material called strontium iridium oxide (Sr3Ir2O7), which is only barely insulating at high temperature. Daniel Mazzone, Yao Shen (Brookhaven Lab), Gilberto Fabbris (Argonne National Laboratory), and Jennifer Sears (Brookhaven Lab) used x-rays at the Advanced Photon Source—a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne National Laboratory—to measure the magnetic interactions and associated energy cost of moving electrons. Jian Liu and Junyi Yang from the University of Tennessee and Argonne scientists Mary Upton and Diego Casa also made important contributions.
The team started their investigation at high temperature and gradually cooled the material. With cooling, the energy gap gradually narrowed. At 285 Kelvin (about 53 degrees Fahrenheit), electrons started jumping between the magnetic layers of the material but immediately formed bound pairs with the holes they’d left behind, simultaneously triggering the antiferromagnetic alignment of adjacent electron spins. Hidemaro Suwa and Christian Batista of the University of Tennessee performed calculations to develop a model using the concept of the predicted antiferromagnetic excitonic insulator, and showed that this model comprehensively explains the experimental results.
“Using x-rays we observed that the binding triggered by the attraction between electrons and holes actually gives back more energy than when the electron jumped over the band gap,” explained Yao Shen. “Because energy is saved by this process, all the electrons want to do this. Then, after all electrons have accomplished the transition, the material looks different from the high-temperature state in terms of the overall arrangement of electrons and spins. The new configuration involves the electron spins being ordered in an antiferromagnetic pattern while the bound pairs create a ‘locked-in’ insulating state.”
The identification of the antiferromagnetic excitonic insulator completes a long journey exploring the fascinating ways electrons choose to arrange themselves in materials. In the future, understanding the connections between spin and charge in such materials could have potential for realizing new technologies.
Brookhaven Lab’s role in this research was funded by the DOE Office of Science, with collaborators receiving funding from a range of additional sources noted in the paper. The scientists also used computational resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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. [https://www.energy.gov/science/]
R.C. Murphy College Team 1 in the Three Village School District took second place in the Middle School Division this year. Photo from BNL
Teams from Jericho Senior High School and Hunter College Middle School each won first place in the 2022 competitions hosted virtually by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory on Friday, Jan. 28 and Saturday. Jan. 29. The tournament-style events quizzed students on a range of science disciplines including biology, chemistry, Earth science, physics, energy, and math.
Both teams will compete against regional winners from around the country in the National Science Bowl® this spring.
“The National Science Bowl regional competitions provide students with an exciting introduction to the National Laboratory system and the Department of Energy,” said Amanda Horn, a Brookhaven Lab educator who coordinated the virtual events. “This contest gives students the opportunity to meet our scientists and support staff who volunteer as competition judges, introduce them to the laboratory’s cyber efforts through the Cyber Challenge and learn about future STEM opportunities available to them.”
As the top schools were called during the High School Science Bowl award ceremony on Jan. 28, Jericho students Hanson Xuan, Derek Minn, Ashwin Narayanan, Natasha Kulviwat, and Brendan Shek jumped up out of their chairs to celebrate.
“I am so surprised, and I am so proud of these people,” Kulviwat said. Team members said they studied up until the night before the competition, only adding to their weekly practices and time spent poring over textbooks in preparation for the big day.
“They worked so hard,” added Jericho coach Samantha Sforza. “They absolutely deserve this win.”
High School runners-up
Half Hollow Hills East High School captured second place this year in the High School Division. Photo from BNL
Second Place: Great Neck South High School – Jansen Wong, Matthew Tsui, Richard Zhuang, Jack Lenga, Eric Pei (Coaches: Nicole Spinelli, James Truglio)
Third Place: Half Hollow Hills East High School – Himani Mattoo, Daniel Salkinder, Dylan D’Agate, Jacob Leshnower, and Jeffin Abraham (Coach: Danielle Talleur)
Fourth Place: Ward Melville High School Team 1 – Ivan Ge, Gabriel Choi, Matthew Chen, Neal Carpino, Michael Melikyan (Coach: Silva Michel)
This year’s Middle School Science Bowl was open to New York City schools, and two teams from Hunter College Middle School earned First Place and Third Place.
“It’s really exciting,” said Devon Lee of Hunter College Middle School Team 1. “I’m just really proud of my team because they’re literally the coolest people I know.”
“Last year, we lost by two points,” added Morgan Lee. “Since I’m in eighth grade now I didn’t think we’d have a chance to come back from that and I’m glad that we did.”
The First Place team also included Segev Pri-Paz and Gabriel Levin. Hunter coach Min-Hsuan Kuo gave credit to high school students who helped the middle schoolers prepare.
“I always knew they would do great,” Kuo said. “We have a really wonderful situation in our school where our high school students are always working with younger students.”
Middle School runners-up
Second Place: R.C. Murphy College Middle School Team 1 –Sahil Ghosh, Harry Gao, Willem VanderVelden, Gabrielle Wong, Kayla Harte (Coaches: Emily Chernakoff Jillian Visser)
Third Place: Hunter College Middle School Team 2 – Kavya Khandelwal, Kyle Wu, Melody Luo, Sophia Kim (Coach: Min-Hsuan Kuo)
Fourth Place: Paul J. Gelinas Jr. High School – Anna Xing, Tina Xing, Colby Medina, William Squire, Kyle McGarvey, (Coach: Monica Flanagan)
All participating students received a Science Bowl t-shirt. Winning teams will also receive trophies, and medals. The first-place high school and middle school teams will also receive a banner to hang at their schools. The top three high school teams will receive cash awards. Prizes were courtesy of Teachers Federal Credit Union and Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA), the event’s sponsors. BSA is the company that manages and operates Brookhaven Lab for DOE.
About 60 volunteers stepped up as virtual scorekeepers, judges, moderators, and support for the back-to-back events. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
One day, ships in the Navy may not only last longer in the harsh environment of salt water, but some of their more complicated parts may also be easier and quicker to fix.
That’s thanks to the mechanical engineering efforts of researchers at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who have been teaming up to understand the microstructural origins of corrosion behavior of parts they produce through laser additive manufacturing into shapes with complex geometries.
The Navy is funding research at the two institutions.
Eric Dooryhee. Photo from BNL
“As you would expect you’d need near any marine environment with salt water, [the Navy] is interested in laser additive manufacturing to enable the production of parts at lower cost that have challenging geometries,” said Jason Trelewicz, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Stony Brook University. Additionally, the Navy is hoping that such efforts can enable the production of parts with specific properties such as corrosion resistance on demand.
“If you’re out at sea and something breaks, can you make something there to replace it?” asked Trelewicz. Ideally, the Navy would like to make it possible to produce parts on demand with the same properties as those that come off a manufacturing line.
While companies are currently adopting laser additive manufacturing, which involves creating three-dimensional structures by melting and resolidfying metal powders one layer at a time with the equivalent of a laser printer, numerous challenges remain for developing properties in printed materials that align with those produced through established routes.
Additive materials, however, offer opportunities to structure products in a way that isn’t accessible through traditional techniques that create more complex geometry components, such as complex heat exchangers with internal cooling channels.
In addition to the science remaining for exploration, which is extensive, the process is driving new discoveries in novel materials containing unique microstructure-chemistry relationships and functionally graded microstructures, Trelewicz explained.
“These materials are enabling new engineering components through expanded design envelopes,” he wrote in an email.
With colleagues from BNL including Research Associate Ajith Pattammattell and Program Manager for the Hard X-ray Scattering and Spectroscopy Program Eric Dooryhee, Trelewicz published a paper recently in the journal Additive Manufacturing that explored the link between the structure of the material and its corrosive behavior for 316L stainless steel, which is a corrosion resistant metal already in wide use in the Navy.
The research looked at the atomic and microstructure of the material built in the lab of Professor Guha Manogharan at Penn State University. Working with Associate Professor Gary Halada in the Department of Material Science and Chemical Engineering, Trelewicz studied the corrosive behavior of these materials.
Often, the surface of the material went through a process called pitting, which is common in steels exposed to corrosive environments, which occurs in cars driven for years across roads salted when it snows.
The researchers wanted to understand “the connection between how the materials are laser printed, what their micro structure is and what it means for its properties,” Trelewicz said, with a specific focus on how fast the materials were printed.
While the research provided some structural and atomic clues about optimizing anti corrosive behavior, the scientists expect that further work will be necessary to build more effective material.
In his view, the next major step is understanding how these defects impact the quality of this protective film, because surface chemical processes govern corrosive behavior.
Based on their research, the rate at which the surface corrodes through laser additive manufacturing is comparable to conventional manufacturing.
Printed materials, however, are more susceptible to attack from localized corrosion, or pitting.
At the hard x-ray nanoprobe, Pattammattel explored the structure of the material at a resolution far below the microscopic level, by looking at nonstructural details.
“It’s the only functional beamline that is below 10 nanometers,” he said. “We can also get an idea about the electronic structures by using x-ray absorption spectroscopy,” which reveals the chemical state.
Pattammattel, who joined BNL in 2018, also uses the beamline to study how lung cells in mice interact with air pollutants. He described “the excitement of contributing to science a little more” as the best part of each day.
Meanwhile, Dooryhee as involved in writing the seed grant proposal. By using the x-rays deflected by the variety of crystalline domains or grains that compose the materials, HE can interpret the material’s atomic structure by observing the diffraction angles. The discrete list of diffraction angles is a unique fingerprint of the material that relates to its long-range atomic ordering or stacking.
In this study, researchers could easily recognize the series of diffraction peaks associated with the 316L stainless steel.
Dooryhee was able to gather insight into the grain size and the grain size distribution, which enabled him to identify defects in the material. He explained that the primary variable they explored was the sweeping rate of the laser beam, which included 550, 650 and 700 millimeters per second. The faster the printing, the lower the deposited energy density.
Ultimately, Dooryhee hopes to conduct so-called in situ studies, in which he examines laser additive manufacturing as it’s occurring.
“The strength of this study was to combine several synchrotron techniques to build a complete picture of the microstructure of the [additively manufactured] material, that can then be related to its corrosion response,” he explained in an email.
Dooryhee grew up in Burgundy France, where his grandfather used to grow wine. He worked in the vineyards during the fall harvest to help pay for his university studies. Dooryhee has worked at BNL for over 12 years and appreciates the opportunity to collaborate with researchers at Stony Brook University.
A TRACER site similar to this one in Argentina is being constructed in Pearland, Texas. Photo courtesy of ARM
By Daniel Dunaief
Before they could look to the skies to figure out how aerosols affected rainclouds and storms around Houston, they had to be sure of the safety of the environment on the ground.
Researchers from several institutions, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, originally planned to begin collecting data that could one day improve weather and even climate models on April 15th of this year.
The pandemic, however, altered that plan twice, with the new start date for the one-year, intensive cloud, study called TRACER, for Tracking Aerosol Convection Interactions, beginning on Oct. 1st.
The delay meant that the “intensive observational period was moved from summer 2021 to summer 2022,” Michael Jensen, the Principal Investigator on Tracer and a meteorologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, explained in an email.
Scientists and ARM staff pose during planning for TRACER (left to right): Iosif “Andrei” Lindenmaier, ARM’s radar systems engineering lead; James Flynn, University of Houston; Michael Jensen, TRACER’s principal investigator from Brookhaven National Laboratory; Stephen Springston, ARM’s Aerosol Observing System lead mentor (formerly Brookhaven Lab, now retired); Chongai Kuang, Brookhaven Lab; and Heath Powers, site manager for the ARM Mobile Facility that will collect measurements during TRACER. (Courtesy of ARM)
At the same time, the extension enabled a broader scientific scope, adding more measurements for the description of aerosol lifecycle and aerosol regional variability. It also allowed the researchers to include air quality data, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and urban meteorology, funded by the National Science Foundation.
The primary motivation for the project is to “understand how aerosols impact storms,” Jensen explained in a presentation designed to introduce the TRACER project to the public.
Some scientists believe aerosols, which are tiny particles that can occur naturally from trees, dust and other sources or from man-made activities like the burning of fossil fuels, can make storms stronger and larger, causing more rain.
“There’s a lot of debate in the literature” about the link between aerosols and storms, Jensen said.
Indeed, there may be a “sweet spot” in which a certain number or concentration of aerosols causes an invigoration of rainstorms, while a super abundance beyond that number reverses the trend, Jensen added.
“We don’t know the answers to those questions,” the BNL scientist said. “That’s why we need to go out there and take detailed measurements of what’s going on inside clouds, how precipitation particles are freezing or melting.”
Even though aerosols are invisible to the naked eye, they could have significant impacts on how mass and energy are distributed in clouds, as well as on broader atmospheric processes that affect weather patterns.
The TRACER study, which is a part of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement, or ARM, user facility, could “help forecast heavy rains that can cause flash flooding,’ said Chongai Kuang, atmospheric scientist and TRACER co-investigator at BNL.
The TRACER study will explore the way sea and bay breeze circulations affect the evolution of deep convective storms as well as examining the influence of urban environments on clouds and precipitation.
Several additional funding agencies have stepped in to address basic scientific questions, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s efforts to address air quality issues in Houston and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which funded a study on ozone and low-level atmospheric mixing.
“Our original TRACER field campaign provided a seed for what is now a major, multi-agency field campaign with a significantly expanded scientific scope,” Jensen explained in an email.
A joint team from BNL and Stony Brook University is developing new software to scan the precipitation radar system to select and track storm clouds to observe the rapid development of these storms. Additionally, aerosol instrumentation will help provide updated information on the precursor gases and the smallest aerosol particles at the earliest stages of the aerosol cycle, Jensen explained.
Ultimately, the data that these scientists gather could improve the ability to forecast storms in a range of areas, including on Long Island.
“Understanding sea breezes and the coastal environment is a very important aspect of TRACER,” Jensen said. “Even though it’s not the preliminary focus, there’s an opportunity to learn new science, to improve weather forecasting and storm forecasting for those coastal environments.”
Researchers chose Houston because of their desire to study a more densely populated urban area and to understand the way numerous factors influence developing clouds, weather patterns and, ultimately, the climate.
“We know the urban environment is where most people live,” Jensen said. “This is taking us in new directions, with new opportunities to influence the science” in these cities.
Researchers plan to collect information about clouds, aerosols and storms everywhere from ground-based instruments stationed at four fixed sites, as well as through mobile facilities, to satellite images.
The program operates a tethered balloon which is “like a big blimp that goes up half a mile into the atmosphere,” said Heath Powers, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement facility site manager for Tracer from Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The tethered balloon is located at Smith Point, Texas, on the eastern shore of Galveston Bay and will do low-level profiling of aerosols, winds, thermodynamics and ozone as it is influenced by bay breeze circulation, Jensen explained.
The National Science Foundation is planning to bring a C-130 plane to conduct overflights, while the group will also likely use drones, Powers added.
The TRACER study will launch around 1,500 weather balloons to gather information at different altitudes. The research will use over four dozen instruments to analyze meteorology, the amount of energy in the atmosphere and the air chemistry.
“Clouds are the big question,” Powers said. “Where they form, why they form … do they rain or not rain. We are well-positioned to get at the core of a lot of this” through the information these scientists gather.
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