Tennessee

Researchers from Berkeley Lab and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have measured the highest toughness ever recorded of any material — about five times tougher than the best steel. While tough, the material is also impressively malleable, and its strength and ductility both improve as it gets colder. Now that the inner workings of the new alloy are better understood, the discovery offers exciting real-world possibilities, especially in situations where environmental extremes could destroy standard metallic alloys, such as in aerospace and defense applications.

A collaborative software development effort called DELERIA (Distributed Event Level Experiment Readout and Analysis) is currently underway at Berkeley Lab and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to accelerate the connection between experiment and supercomputer, allowing analysis in near-real-time, interactive timescales. DELERIA is a testbed project for the nationwide Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) initiative, which aims to link the DOE’s vast experimental and computational resources to accelerate the pace of discovery.