Latest Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Stories

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Friday dedicated the world's largest laser system in Livermore, calling it a gateway to new energy sources. The sprawling National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco has been 12 years in the making and is designed to further research into fusion energy. NIF has the potential to revolutionize our energy system -- teaching us a new way to harness the energy of the sun to power our cars and homes,...

 New research findings could lead to faster, smaller and more versatile computer chips.A team of scientists and engineers from Stanford, the University of Florida and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the first to create one of two basic types of semiconductors using an exotic, new, one-atom-thick material called graphene. The findings could help open the door to computer chips that are not only smaller and hold more memory -- but are also more adept at uploading large files,...

The U.S. Department of Energy says the National Nuclear Security Administration has certified the completion of the world's largest laser. Located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility in California, the laser is expected to allow scientists to achieve fusion ignition in the laboratory, obtaining more energy from the target than is provided by the laser. Completion of the National Ignition Facility is a true milestone that will make America safer and more...

Deep-sea corals from about 400 meters off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands are much older than once believed and some may be the oldest living marine organisms known to man.Researchers from Lawrence Livermore, Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Cruz have determined that two groups of Hawaiian deep-sea corals are far older than previously recorded.Using the Lab's Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, LLNL researchers Tom Guilderson and Stewart Fallon used...

By reversing a process that converts electrical signals into sounds heard out of a cell phone, researchers may have a new tool to enhance the way computer chips, LEDs and transistors are built.Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have for the first time converted the highest frequency sounds into light by reversing a process that converts electrical signals to sound. Commonly used piezo-electric speakers, such as those found in a cell phone, operate at low frequencies that human...

U.S. scientists say they have, for the first time, changed high frequency sounds into light by reversing a process that converts electrical signals to sound. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers said their new tool enhances the way computer chips, LEDs and transistors are build. Commonly used piezo-electric speakers, such as those found in a cell phone, operate at low frequencies that human ears can hear, the scientists from LLNL and the Nitronex Corp. said. But by...

Technique may provide data for NIF nuclear fusion effort The enormous pressures needed to melt diamond to slush and then to a completely liquid state have been determined ten times more accurately by Sandia National Laboratories researchers than ever before.As a bonus to science, researchers Marcus Knudson, Mike Desjarlais, and Daniel Dolan discovered a triple point at which solid diamond, liquid carbon, and a long-theorized but never-before-confirmed state of solid carbon called bc8 were...

A spectacular new image of an unusual spiral galaxy in the Coma galaxy cluster has been created from data obtained by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. It reveals fine details of the galaxy, NGC 4921, and an extraordinary rich background of more remote galaxies stretching back to the early Universe.The Coma galaxy cluster, in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, the hair of Queen Berenice, is one of the closest, very rich collections of galaxies in the...

Models of how Saturn and Jupiter formed may soon take on a different look.By determining the properties of hydrogen-helium mixtures at the millions of atmospheres of pressure present in the interior of Saturn and Jupiter, physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have determined the temperature at a given pressure when helium becomes insoluble in dense metallic hydrogen. The results are directly relevant to models of the interior...

CHATSWORTH, Calif., Nov. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- DataDirect Networks, Inc. the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, highest performance computing environments in the world, today announced that Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) has selected the company's S2A9900 data infrastructure platform to provide scalable I/O for its next-generation computational simulation environment. The storage will be used by a number of LLNL supercomputers, including its newest system, Dawn. In...