(AGENPARL) - Roma, 12 Gennaio 2026(AGENPARL) – Mon 12 January 2026 A weekly compendium of media reports on science and technology achievements
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Though the Laboratory reviews
items for overall accuracy, the reporting organizations are responsible for
the content in the links below.
LLNL Report, Jan. 9, 2026
The Pandora team with engineering hardware for the telescope. (Photo: Garry
McLeod/LLNL)
Are we alone?
Amid a new wave of interest in the possibility of life on other worlds,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and NASA are embarking on a new effort
to identify planets with the basic compounds for life when they launch a
small satellite from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara in January.
The 13-month Pandora Mission will attempt to capture the atmospheric
conditions of 20 planets as they eclipse their respective suns, an effort to
aid the James Webb Space Telescope’s photographing of planets orbiting
vibrant, young stars.
The Pandora team is hoping to find biosignatures — chemicals that can only
be produced by a living organism such as oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane
— which provide evidence of past or present life, though the chance of
finding those gases is almost infinitely small, said Peter McGill, an optical
astronomer on the Pandora Mission. But data gathered in the project could
help answer some of humanity’s biggest questions.
Read More
Members of the collaboration between LLNL and Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute
for Laser Technology visited the National Ignition Facility in December.
(Photo: Mark Meamber/LLNL)
A partnership to perfect fusion
A new partnership between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and
the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology (ILT) in Germany looks to
perfect the amplifiers used in laser-based fusion reactors.
LLNL announced the three-year partnership on Dec. 18, emphasizing the
work’s potential benefits for commercial fusion power. The U.S. Department
of Energy’s STARFIRE program and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’s International
Cooperation and Networking program will provide funding.
Fusion power, if adapted for the power grid, stands to provide an abundant
and reliable source of electricity.
Despite LLNL successes in demonstrating controlled laser fusion, significant
challenges, such as improving the efficiency of laser systems, remain before
commercialization.
“The transition from basic research to power-plant development requires the
rapid, robust development of rugged new laser systems,” Tammy Ma, director
of LLNL’s Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology, stated in the
announcement. “Fraunhofer ILT’s expertise in industrial scaling of
diode-pumped lasers is crucial for accelerating our [inertial fusion energy]
program.”
Read More
This technology platform, named MetaLitho3D, recently won a 2025 R&D 100
Award, indicating the potential for industry adoption to solve real-world
problems. (Images: Songyun Gu)
Nano printing enters the fast lane
R&D 100 winner LLNL achieves 1,000x speed boost in 3D nanofabrication
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University
say they have built a two-photon lithography system that could push 3D
nanofabrication toward manufacturing scale, boosting throughput by more than
1,000 times compared with commercial tools while maintaining minimum feature
sizes of 113 nanometers.
Two-photon lithography uses ultrafast laser pulses to harden material only at
the laser’s tight focal point, letting engineers “write” complex 3D
structures with very fine detail. The technique is valued for resolution, but
it has been slow and confined to small fields of view because most systems
rely on microscope objectives. Printing anything larger typically requires
stitching together thousands of tiny tiles, a workflow that takes time and
can introduce alignment errors.
The new platform, described Dec. 17 in /Nature/, replaces the microscope
objective with tiled arrays of metalenses, ultrathin optical elements
engineered to shape light. Instead of scanning a single focus across a
surface, the metalens array splits a femtosecond laser into more than 120,000
coordinated focal spots, allowing the system to write in parallel across
centimeter-scale areas.
Read More
R&D 100 winner LLNL achieves 1,000x speed boost in 3D nanofabrication
An example orbit from the dataset, with the earth’s frame of reference on
the left and the moon’s on the right. (Image: Yeager et al.)
Mapping one million moon paths
https://phys.org/news/2025-12-moon-master-commute.html
Even most rocket scientists would rather avoid hard math when they don’t have
to do it. So when it comes to figuring out orbits in complex three-body
systems, like those in cis-lunar space, which is between Earth and the moon,
they’d rather someone else do the work for them.
Luckily, some scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seem to
have a masochistic streak — or enough of an altruistic one that it
overwhelmed the unpleasantness of doing the hard math — to come up with an
open-source dataset and software package that maps out 1,000,000 cis-lunar
orbits. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.
Note that the last paragraph didn’t say stable cis-lunar orbits. In fact,
only 9.7% of them were “stable” over the three years the simulation was run.
Others resulted in a satellite either crashing into the moon, burning up in
Earth’s atmosphere, or being ejected from the system entirely. So why is it
so difficult to stay in orbit between Earth and the moon?
Read More https://phys.org/news/2025-12-moon-master-commute.html
Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and CEO Antonio Neri (left) and AMD
Chair and CEO Lisa Su signed an El Capitan compute rack at the
supercomputer’s dedication. (Photo: Garry McLeod/LLNL)
El Capitan shines in 2025
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/biggest-moments-in-science-2025
While the internet obsessed over juicy diss tracks, scrutinised the details
of jewel heists and chased down Labubus, science moved behind the scenes in
ways that altered the world.
For the better or worse, here are the top seven ways that events and
breakthroughs in 2025 changed our lives forever. (Hint: it doesn’t include
Katy Perry jettisoning into space).
1. The world’s fastest supercomputer
In January, the world’s fastest supercomputer was inaugurated at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Named El Capitan,
it’s only the third computer ever to reach exascale computing speeds –
with a peak performance of 2.79 exaFLOPS (2.79 quintillion calculations —
known as ‘floating point operations’ — per second).
The supercomputer will be used to organize America’s stockpile of nuclear
weapons and research the design of new ones. Its construction started in May
2023 and cost $600 million.
Read More https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/biggest-moments-in-science-2025
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Administration.
Read previous Lab Report articles online https://www.llnl.gov/news/lab-report
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