(AGENPARL) – Fri 26 September 2025 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, Sept. 26, 2025
The fully-3D printed vertical ion trap designed and miniaturized by LLNL
researchers and their collaborators. (Photo: Garry McLeod/LLNL)
Ion the prize
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/3d-printed-ion-traps-quantum-computing
Quantum computing researchers have long wrestled with a tradeoff. Planar ion
traps, built with flat electrodes, scale easily for larger systems but
sacrifice performance.. Traditional 3D traps, on the other hand, keep ions
more stable but are bulky and harder to integrate.
Now, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the
University of California may have found a way to combine the best of both.
Working with UC Berkeley, UC Riverside and UC Santa Barbara, the team has
miniaturized quadrupole ion traps using high-resolution 3D printing.
Quadrupole ion traps use four electrode poles to generate oscillating
electric fields that confine ions.
When lasers cool those ions to their lowest energy state, they act as qubits,
the fundamental units of quantum information. Unlike other qubit approaches,
trapped ions can maintain coherence longer and operate without cryogenic
refrigeration.
But scalability has limited their progress. “3D printing gives us the
confinement we need to trap the ion well and at high frequencies, and we can
also make many ion traps on the same chip,” said Xiaoxing Xia, staff
engineer at LLNL.
Read More
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/3d-printed-ion-traps-quantum-computing
LLNL researchers in the laboratory where samples retrieved from the asteroid
Bennu were prepared and analyzed. (Photo: Garry McLeod/LLNL)
To Bennu and back
https://www.independentnews.com/news/livermore_news/asteroid-sample-points-to-genesis-of-the-solar-system/article_c5a5dab5-a7c9-4103-a8c0-6ebde36033f0.html
Material collected from an asteroid via spacecraft closely matches the
heavier elements of the sun, providing scientists with a physical sample of
the solar system’s raw materials, according to a recent paper published by
a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
NASA on Sept. 8, 2016, launched the Origins, Spectral Interpretation,
Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx)
spacecraft, which landed on an asteroid named Bennu on Oct. 20, 2020. During
its visit, the spacecraft collected a sample of rocks and dust from the small
asteroid, then safely returned it to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023. Last year, LLNL
received 0.5 grams out of the 121.6-gram sample for analysis.
Bennu is composed mainly of “hydrated clay minerals, magnetite, sulfides,
carbonates, organic matter, phosphates and small abundances of anhydrous
silicates and oxides including olivine, pyroxene and spinel,” according to
the paper.
“To me, this is a really fascinating thing, because it really kind of gets
down to our origins as a planet and humans,” author and LLNL scientist Greg
Brennecka said.
Read More
https://www.independentnews.com/news/livermore_news/asteroid-sample-points-to-genesis-of-the-solar-system/article_c5a5dab5-a7c9-4103-a8c0-6ebde36033f0.html
A schematic of the Single-shot Advanced Plasma Probe Holographic
Reconstruction, or SAPPHIRE, diagnostic. (Image: Grace et al.)
Lights, camera, plasma!
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-shot-laser-technique-captures-plasma.html
Plasma, ionized gas and the fourth state of matter, makes up over 99% of the
ordinary matter in the universe. Understanding its properties is critical for
developing fusion energy sources, modeling astrophysical objects like stars
and improving manufacturing techniques for semiconductors in modern cell
phones.
But watching and determining what happens inside high-density plasmas is
difficult. Events can unfold in trillionths of a second and behave in
complex, unpredictable ways.
In a study published in Optica, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (LLNL) developed a new diagnostic that captures plasma evolution
in time and space with a single laser shot. This breakthrough creates plasma
movies with 100 billion frames per second, illuminating ultrafast dynamics
that were previously impossible to observe.
“In most high-energy, high-intensity laser experiments currently, we take a
single image per laser shot,” said LLNL scientist and lead author Liz Grace.
“However, these plasmas are unstable and unpredictable, and small changes can
have butterfly effects that impact the subsequent evolution.. It’s important
to capture as much information at once as possible.”
Read More
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-shot-laser-technique-captures-plasma.html
El Capitan is the fastest computer on Earth and in the top 25 Green500
supercomputers.
El Cap chills out
https://www.techfinitive.com/features/is-liquid-cooling-imperative-for-high-performance-computing/
Heat dissipation is a perennial problem for computers, whether they be the
phones in our pockets, the laptops we carry in our bags or the workstations
we use at our desks. But that challenge becomes significantly more difficult
and serious in the datacenter, where thousands of servers are crunching their
way through myriad workloads 24/7.
While traditional air cooling has historically been suitable for the
datacenter, it is running out of effectiveness and capacity.
Right now, 40% of a datacenter’s power usage is dedicated to cooling. As
our reliance on datacenters increases, it’s clear that more efficient
cooling can drastically reduce power consumption, overall operational cost,
and usher in ever-more performant compute solutions.
In November 2024, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled El Capitan.
Built using HPE Cray EX supercomputers, which included 100% fanless direct
liquid cooling architecture. El Capitan instantly became the world’s
fastest supercomputer, pushing Frontier – also built by HPE – into second
place in the TOP500 List of supercomputers.
Read More
https://www.techfinitive.com/features/is-liquid-cooling-imperative-for-high-performance-computing/
An artist rendering of two water droplets playing a game of tic-tac-toe.
(Image: EllaMaru Studio for LLNL)
Tying at tic-tac-toe

Research Bits: Sept. 23

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers and their collaborators
created a droplet-based platform that uses ions to perform simple
neuromorphic computations, such as recognizing handwritten digits and playing
tic-tac-toe.
The device uses two droplets of salt water coated with lipids that are then
suspended in oil, where they touch and form a bilayer that mimics a cell
membrane. An electrode inserted into each droplet applies a voltage, and the
current response of the droplet pair is measured.
The researchers found that the droplets exhibited a memory effect, producing
a slightly different current depending on the voltage that was applied
previously. While high voltages typically result in high current outputs, the
team conducted an experiment similar to Pavlov’s dog that showed that by
giving the droplet system repeated training spikes of low and high voltages,
they could induce high current outputs at low voltages.
To play tic-tac-toe, the moves were input as voltage codes into the droplet,
and the output was mapped to what move the droplet should make next. After
training, the droplet system was able to tie its computer opponent
consistently.
Read More https://semiengineering.com/research-bits-sept-23/
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