Sandia Labs FY21 LDRD Annual Report

FY21 ANNUAL REPORT

Project Highlights – Technical Vitality LDRD is essential to maintaining the Labs’ scientific vitality and Sandia, as the nation’s most diverse national security laboratory, is uniquely equipped to tackle groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research. Researchers collaborate across a broad spectrum of disciplines and achieve research breakthroughs, which enables national security technology to be transferred to industry, commercialized under licensing agreements, and brought to market for the U.S. public good. The LDRD accomplishments in the technical vitality section highlight research outcomes that significantly extend knowledge in the scientific field or have the potential to provide a new capability for Sandia in the future. Table-top XUV/VUV radiation instruments will enable study of fast chemical transformations. Sustainable energy technologies of the future will revolve around transformational new materials and chemical processes that convert energy efficiently among photons, electrons, and chemical bonds. The two new major instruments for generating high-photon energy pulses developed through this LDRD project provide the capability to perform ultrafast core-level spectroscopy, which opens avenues for studying fast chemical transformations that govern processes such as bond dissociation, charge transfer, and carrier dynamics in gas phase, solid state, and interfaces, in an element-specific way. These new extreme ultraviolet (XUV) and vacuum ultraviolet radiation (VUV) techniques and tools will benefit researchers engaging in basic energy sciences and provide the U.S. with the ability to engineer effective catalysts for essential processes such as fuel generation and chemical synthesis. (PI: Krupa Ramasesha)

XUV apparatus.

VUV apparatus.

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LABORATORY DIRECTED RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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