Berkeley Lab

Every chip in your phone, laptop, and AI tools owes something to EUV lithography, a technique that prints circuits 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. It took decades of research at Berkeley Lab's Center for X-Ray Optics to make it commercially viable.

As CXRO Director Bruno La Fontaine put it: "CXRO will continue to play a vital role in helping push the boundaries of Moore's Law even further in the many years to come."

Basic science, real-world impact.

Advanced Light Source

Read more in the comment below:

Targeted alpha therapy is an emerging cancer treatment that uses alpha-emitting radioisotopes to target and destroy cancer cells without damaging nearby healthy cells.

The radioisotope actinium-225 shows promise for targeted alpha therapy, but the medical scanners available today lack the resolution and detection efficiency needed to accurately image actinium-225 and locate tumors.

To bridge this gap, Javier Caravaca, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division, has developed a new technique called Time-of-Flight Cascade Gamma Imaging (TOF-CGI). The advance could allow existing scanners to image targeted alpha therapy more accurately and enable its widespread adoption.

“TOF-CGI brings us a step closer to helping clinicians diagnose and treat cancer in a way that wasn’t possible before.” — Javier Caravaca, Berkeley Lab scientist

NERSC

(Full story link in comments below)

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) has been working with NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration for over a decade to study a crucial, life-saving process: how spacecraft heat shields degrade under extreme conditions during atmospheric reentry.

This time, researchers reached even higher temperatures than ever before — using a custom sample environment found only at the ALS that independently controls temperature, pressure, and gas mixture to recreate real reentry conditions.

Using X-ray micro-computed tomography combined with AI-powered image enhancement, the team captured real-time, 3D views of two NASA heat shield materials as they broke down at 1,652°F — revealing striking structural differences that affect how each performs during reentry.

"Nearly every major NASA ablative heat shield material has been studied with this technique at the Advanced Light Source, including those relevant to the Artemis and Mars entry missions," said Vishnu Oruganti, an ALS user.

The findings are already helping engineers improve how they model and design thermal protection systems for missions like Artemis — bringing crews home safely.

(Full story link in comments below)

Scientists developed a powerful new approach that enabled them to observe how electrons interact with defects in advanced semiconductor devices with an unprecedented level of detail. Their methodology included an innovative simulation tool that enabled accurate theoretical interpretations of their experimental observations.

“Our methods open the door to the discovery of never-seen-before electron behaviors that can be used for new semiconductor capabilities. This will be important for the future development of semiconductor devices at the ultimate limits of miniaturization.” - Mike Crommie

(Details via first link in comments)

AI is giving researchers a new way to tackle one of the hardest computational problems in quantum materials science.

Berkeley Lab’s new Σ-Attention framework combines transformer-based AI with established physics methods to make complex quantum simulations more computationally efficient, an important step toward modeling larger, more realistic materials.

Learn how the approach could advance research for future energy and quantum technologies. ⬇️
https://cs.lbl.gov/news-and-events/news/2026/berkeley-lab-ai-learns-classic-physics-to-scale-quantum-simulations/

⚛️ Predicting how electrons behave in quantum materials is one of the greatest computational challenges in modern physics. To solve this, Berkeley Lab researchers have developed Σ-Attention (Sigma-Attention), a highly scalable new AI framework.
🧠 By adapting the same transformer architecture that powers modern LLMs, the team trained their AI on a combination of three traditional quantum simulation techniques. Instead of predicting the next word in a sentence, Σ-Attention learns to predict “self-energy,” a mathematical function capturing how strongly correlated electrons interact and influence one another.
⚡ Traditional computational methods force researchers to trade off between accuracy and system size. Σ-Attention breaks this barrier by accurately predicting collective electron behavior across various conditions while drastically reducing the required computing power. This breakthrough allows scientists to simulate much larger, more realistic quantum materials, paving the way for next-generation technologies like lossless power transmission, advanced quantum sensors, and ultra-efficient computing.
Learn more in comments ⬇️
(📸: Hardware of a current quantum computer, the exact kind of technology Σ-Attention will help advance.)

______________________________________

: Dark matter researchers have seen something unusual in the LZ detector. Physicist Richard Gaitskell talks with Science Friday about the hunt for a particle and what’s so interesting about the recent result.

Did scientists just find a dark matter particle? Maybe The LUX-ZEPLIN detector picked up a strange signal that scientists haven’t cracked yet. Could it be a dark matter interaction?

Today, we pause to remember the people whose lives were lost on September 11, 2001, and the families, friends, colleagues, and communities who still carry that loss.

We also remember the courage and compassion shown by first responders and by so many people who stepped forward to help one another.

Twenty-five years later, their memory remains with us. 🤍

Know an early-career researcher who should see this? Our Advanced Light Source is opening doors for the next generation of scientists. Please share with doctoral students, postdocs, and others in your research networks. Details via link in comments below!

You've got a chance to immerse yourself in the ALS community! Applications are now open for and to start in 2027, and all the details are available on our website (see the link in the first comment). Please note the earlier fellowship start time and increased flexibility in order to maximize the hours of light before dark time for the ALS Upgrade Project. We'd love to have you join us at Berkeley Lab 🤗

A leader’s impact can be measured in the people they’ve influenced.

At a retirement reception for Berkeley Lab Director Emeritus Mike Witherell, employees shared how his time at the Lab shaped their careers, their leadership styles, and their lives.

Hear their reflections as they say farewell to Mike. 🎥

Farewell From the Lab At the retirement reception for Lab Director Emeritus Mike Witherel...