Aclara Resources and Argonne National Laboratory have successfully completed Phase I of their groundbreaking digital twin project, enhancing rare earths separation.

Newswise — Argonne scientists selected for DOE early-career support to pursue projects in advanced X-ray optics, chemical reaction mapping, charged polymer resilience and Lake Michigan climate modeling. Four researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have been named recipients of 2026 Early Career Research Program awards from the DOE Office of Science. Raymond Conley, Sarah Elliott, Joan Montes de Oca and William Pringle will each receive $550,000 per year for five years to further their research. This DOE Office of Science program seeks to strengthen the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to outstanding researchers early in their careers, when many scientists make formative contributions. Awardees were selected from a large pool of applicants from universities and national laboratories based on peer review by scientific experts. Raymond Conley is the optics fabrication section leader in Argonne’s X-ray Science division. His research focuses on developing advanced X-ray optics that can focus high-energy X-ray beams to extremely small spots, enabling scientists to image and study materials in greater detail. Conley’s project will develop a new way to manufacture these optics using atomic layer deposition, a technique that builds highly uniform coatings one layer at a time. Although the...

Newswise — Argonne scientists selected for DOE early-career support to pursue projects in advanced X-ray optics, chemical reaction mapping, charged polymer resilience and Lake Michigan climate modeling. Four researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have been named recipients of 2026 Early Career Research Program awards from the DOE Office of Science. Raymond Conley, Sarah Elliott, Joan Montes de Oca and William Pringle will each receive $550,000 per year for five years to further their research. This DOE Office of Science program seeks to strengthen the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to outstanding researchers early in their careers, when many scientists make formative contributions. Awardees were selected from a large pool of applicants from universities and national laboratories based on peer review by scientific experts. Raymond Conley is the optics fabrication section leader in Argonne’s X-ray Science division. His research focuses on developing advanced X-ray optics that can focus high-energy X-ray beams to extremely small spots, enabling scientists to image and study materials in greater detail. Conley’s project will develop a new way to manufacture these optics using atomic layer deposition, a technique that builds highly uniform coatings one layer at a time. Although the...

Newswise — A delicious chocolate chip cookie all comes down to its bake. A minute too long and you’ll be munching on a crunchy cookie. Seconds too soon, and you’ve got nothing but goo. The key to achieving the perfect cookie is watching it bake. Andrew Chuang and Dileep Singh, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, teamed up with DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers to perfect a recipe of their own — not for cookies, but for aluminum alloys used in our vehicles, making them more energy efficient and less dependent on imported raw materials. “Our main work was to design and then run the experiment, and that allowed us to monitor the structural changes in the alloys in real time,” said Chuang, a physicist in the X-ray Science division of Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS). They used the beamline at the APS, a DOE Office of Science user facility, to observe the solidification of the molten alloy while applying ultrasonification energy to the system. Ultrasonification uses sound waves at frequencies too high for humans to hear. As the ultrasound waves pass through the material, they transfer mechanical energy to it, producing a...

Aaron Fluitt, formerly of Argonne National Laboratory’s Q-NEXT center, joins the Chicago Quantum Exchange as CEO, succeeding Kate Timmerman.