Year in review: Argonne highlights from 2023

Newswise — Some of the work happening today at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory can already be felt in the form of new vaccines, accessible climate models and big steps toward quantum computing. Other efforts — less tangible but no less crucial — lay the groundwork for scientific advances that are just glimmers on the horizon.

Breakthroughs of both kinds exemplify another year of innovation at Argonne. Here are a few key moments from 2023.

Boosting range in electric cars

“An exciting new generation of battery types for electric vehicles beyond lithium ion is on the horizon,” said Zhengcheng (John) Zhang, a group leader in Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering division.

Zhang and colleagues at Argonne are developing new chemistries that can take electric cars farther, enhance safety and cost less compared with current energy storage options. Research published in June demonstrated a battery electrolyte, which is the liquid through which lithium ions move to charge and discharge, containing a type of fluoride — the same compound that goes into toothpaste. The electrolyte works with a lithium-metal battery, which uses lithium metal in place of the graphite normally used in lithium-ion batteries.

The fluoride-based electrolyte could help unlock the stronger long-term performance needed for lithium metal batteries to meet their potential as an energy-dense alternative to lithium-ion batteries. That could aid in the effort to use clean electricity rather than fossil fuels for not only electric cars but difficult-to-electrify vehicles like long-haul trucks.

Read more about the new electrolyte.

A vision for artificial intelligence in scientific discovery

Seizing on the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform science, more than 1,000 scientists, engineers, and staff from DOE national labs, academia, and technology companies met in a series of workshops focused on the rapidly emerging opportunities and challenges of scientific AI.

Insights from those discussions were compiled in the report ​“AI for Science, Energy, and Security,” a blueprint for the U.S. to accelerate progress by expanding its capabilities in AI and big data analysis. The report lays out a comprehensive vision to expand DOE’s scientific use of AI by building on existing strengths in world-leading high performance computing systems and data infrastructure.

The report describes scientific ​“grand challenges” — in climate modeling, quantum information science, clean energy and other areas — where AI plays a major role in making progress toward solutions. The authors identify six AI capabilities and the crosscutting technology needed to enable these AI-powered transformations.

Read more about the report.

A new foundry for quantum science and technology

Using the quantum properties of nature to sense, relay and store data requires innovation at the atomic scale. In April, Argonne debuted a new facility dedicated to this purpose. At the Argonne Quantum Foundry, a 6,000-square-foot research facility, scientists develop the materials and data needed for quantum information technology. Such technology will power ultrasensitive sensors, computers handling calculations that far exceed the capabilities of current machines and extremely secure communication networks.

Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center hosted at Argonne and founded in 2020, led the creation of the foundry.

“There are few places in the country dedicated to creating high-quality, standardized materials for quantum technologies, and we are pleased that one of them is now here at Argonne,” said Q-NEXT Director David Awschalom at the time of the foundry’s official opening.

The foundry provides researchers with the tools to develop, test, fabricate and integrate the building blocks of quantum systems. The facility also strengthens the U.S. quantum ecosystem of industry, academia and government agencies, all building the next generation of semiconducting devices.

Read more about the Argonne Quantum Foundry.

Major milestones for the Aurora supercomputer

Argonne achieved significant progress with Aurora, an exascale machine housed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility. As one of the world’s first exascale supercomputers, Aurora will drive revolutionary advances in various fields, including cosmology, cancer research and AI for science.

Last summer, Argonne installed the system’s 10,624^th and final ​“blade.” The blades are sleek, rectangular units weighing about 70 pounds that contain its processors, memory, networking and cooling technologies. While the team continues to ready Aurora for the scientific community, early performance numbers shared in November offered a sneak peek of the system’s powerful capabilities.

“We are very pleased to see how well the system performs at this point,” said Susan Coghlan, ALCF project director for Aurora. ​“The early performance results highlight Aurora’s immense potential not only for scientific computing but also for advancing data analysis and artificial intelligence applications.”

Read more about Aurora.

X-ray science leads to a groundbreaking vaccine

Among many breakthroughs enabled by powerful X-rays at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility, the vaccine Arexvy was cleared for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in May. Developed by pharmaceutical company GSK plc, Arexy is the first respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine to be approved in the United States. Severe RSV causes 6,000 to 10,000 deaths among people 65 or older in the U.S. each year.

GSK’s vaccine is based in part on data collected at the APS starting in 2009. The vaccine’s efficacy rests on targeting the F protein, which sticks out from the surface of the virus and makes first contact with human cells, infecting them. Researchers created more than 100 different variants of the F protein; parts of that work were performed at the Southeast Regional Collaborative Access Team (SER-CAT) beamline at the APS.

“The structures we determined at the APS played an important role in the development of this vaccine,” said researcher Jason McLellan, now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. ​“The availability of light source facilities such as the APS meant that we could try multiple variants until we hit on the most stabilized antigen.”

Read more about the science behind the vaccine.

Field research to understand climate change in cities

An Argonne-led research project aims to address gaps in the scientific understanding of how climate change will impact urban environments. The Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) project is a Chicago-based Urban Integrated Field Laboratory funded by the DOE for a five-year study.

To advance CROCUS research, scientists and academicians work collaboratively with some of the communities most affected by climate change. What is learned about the current and historical climate impacts on communities, and the communities’ priorities for the future, directly informs the research and requires understanding the lived experiences of the residents. Community partners have been part of the research team from the start, working alongside the scientists, contributing to the science questions, informing the research activity, and co-designing future scenarios.

The research team has installed sensors that allow for near-real-time readings that measure wind, temperature, rainfall, snow accumulation, radiation and air pollution on a neighborhood scale. Sensor sites include Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University and Northwestern University. In the next few years, CROCUS researchers will deploy nearly 20 sensor arrays across the city to gather more data on Chicago’s changing climate.

The data collected will identify short- and long-term changes in climate. This information can help communities choose technical solutions to address climate-related issues such as heat islands, flooding and extreme weather. Ultimately, CROCUS research will lead to enhanced urban resilience in response to the climate crisis.

Read more about CROCUS.

APS upgrade begins in earnest

After more than a decade of planning and preparation, the APS shut down in April to make way for a new system. The shutdown began a 12-month removal, installation and commissioning period, after which the upgraded APS will deliver X-ray beams that are up to 500 times brighter than before.

First, the existing storage ring, spanning about two-thirds of a mile, was dismantled. Then the team began bringing in 200 preassembled modules weighing up to 50,000 pounds each. These make up the storage ring that circulates electrons. Specialized magnets in the storage ring slightly alter the electrons’ orbit, generating X-ray beams 1 billion times brighter than those of laboratory sources. These bright beams make it possible to see an array of scientific phenomena that cannot be studied otherwise.

“The APS Upgrade opens up possibilities that could not be envisioned till now,” said Argonne physicist Suresh Narayanan. “[Scientific] areas such as energy storage, biomaterials, high pressure research, glasses, quantum materials and oxides will reach new horizons.”

Read more about the APS upgrade.

Extracting a clean fuel from water

A clean fuel that can power vehicles and industrial processes, hydrogen is an important part of the quest to lower carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Producing clean hydrogen at low cost remains a challenge. In May, a multi-institutional team led by Argonne published research demonstrating a low-cost catalyst for a process that splits hydrogen off from water (H₂O).

The type of catalyst developed is for a proton exchange membrane electrolyzer, which is a method for efficiently extracting hydrogen from water at near room temperature. But such catalysts usually rely on iridium, which can cost thousands of dollars per ounce. The researchers developed a catalyst using cobalt, which is substantially cheaper and can work with electricity from renewable sources. The team’s achievement is a step forward in DOE’s Hydrogen Energy Earthshot initiative, which has a goal to lower the cost for green hydrogen production to one dollar per kilogram in a decade.

Read more about the catalyst.

More efficient charging for electric vehicles

As more and more electric vehicles hit the road, the electric grid and attached charging stations will need to recharge them quickly and cheaply. Collaborating with students at the University of Chicago, Argonne scientists devised a way to train an algorithm to help schedule and manage charging for a diverse set of electric vehicles. The method uses reinforcement learning, a type of machine learning that incorporates feedback from both positive results (an electric vehicle achieves a certain amount of charge before a designated departure time) and negative ones (the vehicle draws power beyond a certain peak threshold).

The team tested its strategy on a group of cars at Argonne’s Smart Energy Plaza, which offers both AC regular chargers and DC fast chargers. Although the Argonne charging stations were the first testing location, the model can potentially be expanded far beyond the laboratory’s gates. Future work will involve simulating a much larger charging network initially using data collected from Argonne’s chargers.

“True smart charging is really taking into consideration all of the actors in the ecosystem,” said Argonne Principal Electrical Engineer Jason Harper. ​“That means the [energy] utility, the charging station owner and the electric vehicle driver or homeowner. We want to meet the needs of everyone while still being mindful of the restrictions that everyone faces.”

Read more about the machine learning strategy.

An achievement in nuclear nonproliferation

Medical isotopes are used in more than 40,000 medical procedures in the U.S. each day, including for the diagnosis of heart disease and cancer. For decades, scientists and engineers at Argonne have been helping the world’s medical isotope production facilities switch from the use of highly enriched uranium to the use of low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is much more difficult to use in military devices. This past year saw the completion of the last step in that effort: the successful conversion of Belgium’s National Institute of Radioelements.

“As a result of this accomplishment, all major global molybdenum-99 production facilities now use LEU,” said Temitope Taiwo, director of the Nuclear Science and Engineering division at Argonne. ​“Our scientists and engineers work diligently to see problems solved and challenges overcome, and this is a moment when we can celebrate the impact of that diligence worldwide.”

Read more about the milestone.

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.

About the Advanced Photon Source

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

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

About Q-NEXT

Q-NEXT is a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Argonne National Laboratory. Q-NEXT brings together world-class researchers from national laboratories, universities and U.S. technology companies with the goal of developing the science and technology to control and distribute quantum information. Q-NEXT collaborators and institutions will create two national foundries for quantum materials and devices, develop networks of sensors and secure communications systems, establish simulation and network test beds, and train the next-generation quantum-ready workforce to ensure continued U.S. scientific and economic leadership in this rapidly advancing field. For more information, visit https://​q​-next​.org/.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

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