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Laboratory Directed Research and Development
Modernizing high-explosives manufacturing
For decades, manufacturing plastic-bonded high explosives, or PBXs, has relied on legacy processes like slurry coating. In this method, explosive crystals are mixed with a binder, a polymer that helps hold the material together, to form small granules called prills. Those prills are then pressed into dense explosive parts. This process is difficult to control, inefficient…
Researchers create first-of-a-kind laser spring with LLNL’s highest-precision optics to date
When a high-intensity laser interacts with plasma, the charged particles typically oscillate back and forth like waves on the ocean. But what if the laser itself could twist like a whirlpool? Researchers have now demonstrated a rotating, spring-shaped laser pulse, opening up new possibilities for fusion energy, particle acceleration, astrophysics and beyond. In new…
Laser experiments push helium to record shock pressures
Deep inside gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, hydrogen and helium coexist under pressures millions of times greater than Earth’s atmosphere. At those conditions, helium may separate from hydrogen and influence a planet’s internal heat flow, structure and magnetic field. Understanding these processes and how these materials behave under extreme conditions is essential to…
LLNL showcases AI-enabled science, national security and energy innovation at AI+ Expo
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) leaders, scientists and engineers joined national voices at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s (SCSP) AI+ Expo May 7-9 in Washington, D.C., highlighting how AI is reshaping science, security and energy innovation. The public Expo brought together government, industry, academic and Department of Energy (DOE) national…
Allowing atoms to come and go opens the door to better materials modeling
Most materials, especially metals and ceramics, are crystals. Their atoms are arranged in three-dimensional lattices that repeat the same exact pattern, over and over again. But there’s a well-known saying in materials science: “Crystals are like people. It is the defects that tend to make them interesting.” In a new study, published in Physical Review Letters, researchers…
LLNL honors 36 as 2026 Distinguished Members of Technical Staff
Thirty-six Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have been named Distinguished Members of Technical Staff (DMTS) in recognition of their extraordinary scientific and technical contributions, as affirmed by their professional peers and the broader scientific community. As distinguished citizens of the Laboratory and their respective fields, DMTS honorees…
LLNL, Meta co-develop groundbreaking polymer-chemistry dataset for training AI models
Polymers are fundamental to our daily lives, serving as the core components for a wide array of goods, including clothing, packaging, transportation infrastructure, construction materials and electronics. Advances in polymer science open pathways for recycling and upcycling waste materials into more valuable chemical feedstocks. They also can have an outsized environmental…
Mission challenge ideas day turns bold concepts into space security capabilities
Exploring new frontiers of space requires innovative approaches to anticipate and identify paths for integrating space domain awareness capabilities. To deliver solutions for these emergent challenges, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Global Security Directorate recently hosted a “Space LDRD Ideas Day.” Researchers from a broad range of disciplines attended…
Fentanyl or phony? Machine-learning algorithm learns to pick out opioid signatures
New forms of fentanyl are created every day. For law enforcement, that poses a challenge: how do you identify a chemical you’ve never seen before? Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) aim to answer that question with a machine-learning model that can distinguish opioids from other chemicals with an accuracy over 95% in a laboratory setting. The…
From fleeting to stable: scientists uncover recipe for new carbon dioxide-based energetic materials
When materials are compressed, their atoms are forced into unusual arrangements that do not normally exist under everyday conditions. These configurations are often fleeting: when the pressure is released, the atoms typically relax back to a stable low-pressure state. Only a few very specific materials, like diamond, retain their high-pressure structure after returning to…
LLNL team develops new material that bends, bounces and absorbs energy on demand
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and their collaborators have created a new class of programmable soft materials that can absorb impacts like never before, while also changing shape when heated. The research — which includes collaborators from Harvard University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Sandia National Laboratories and…
Self-driving lab to automate the discovery of novel alloys
Pure metals like aluminum or titanium don’t always have the desired material properties — strength, hardness, ductility or corrosion resistance — for a given application. For this reason, researchers seek out novel alloy solutions, mixing a primary metal element with a series of other elements to create a material with tailored properties for uses in aerospace, defense,…
Breaking down corrosion to predict failure and design stronger materials
You’ve seen the movie scene: dilapidated skyscrapers, collapsed bridges, and empty, shell-like cars in a post-apocalyptic city. While Hollywood imagines fictional causes for this decay, in reality, the culprit is far more mundane: corrosion. Corrosion costs trillions of dollars globally, with up to three percent of the U.S. GDP spent on failing materials. New research from…
Ramping up the scale of climate and energy technology
One of the biggest challenges implementing energy and climate technologies is actually scaling it up to deploy it. While scale-up has largely been the domain of industrial R&D teams, advances in modelling and experimental techniques increasingly allow early-stage researchers like those at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to contribute to the process. In a…
LLNL researchers explore next-gen 3D printing to harness fusion energy
When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) achieved fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022, the world’s attention turned to the prospect of how that breakthrough experiment — designed to secure the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile — might also pave the way for virtually limitless, safe and carbon-free fusion energy. Advanced 3D…
3D-printed electrode is all charged up
The architectural design of electrodes offers new opportunities for next-generation electrochemical energy storage devices (EESDs) by increasing surface area, thickness and storage capacity. But conventional thick electrodes increase ion diffusion length and cause larger ion-concentration gradients, limiting reaction kinetics, including storage capacity. To overcome these…
Evaluating trust and safety of large language models
Amid the skyrocketing popularity of large language models (LLMs), researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are taking a closer look at how these artificial intelligence (AI) systems perform under measurable scrutiny. LLMs are generative AI tools trained on massive amounts of data in order to produce a text-based response to a query. This technology has the…
Unveiling the key factors that determine properties of porous polymer materials
Determining the relationship between microstructure features and their properties is crucial for improving material performance and advancing the design of next-generation structural and functional materials. However, this task is inherently challenging. To address the challenges, LLNL scientists developed an efficient and comprehensive computational framework to decipher…
Chemical production gets a cleaner boost
A new electrochemical method can make chemical production cleaner and more energy-efficient. Using thin film nickel anodes, a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and collaborators have figured out how to clean up chemical production. When studying a new electrochemical reaction, using thin films is important because they give a consistent…
It’s getting hot in here: lasers deliver powerful shocking punch
Shock experiments are widely used to understand the mechanical and electronic properties of matter under extreme conditions, like planetary impacts by meteorites. However, after the shock occurs, a clear description of the post-shock thermal state and its impacts on material properties is still lacking. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists used ultra…
