Sandia Labs

Concentrating solar power (CSP) plants can be a key part of a renewable energy strategy, but progress is often focused on larger facilities. Now, engineers from Sandia National Laboratories are improving the efficiency of smaller plants, designing a new receiver that can absorb much more sunlight.

Sandia National Laboratories is up to big things. After having recently replicated the energy found around black holes, the facility has just delivered proof of concept for a method of testing rocket parts using a 60-foot-long (18 m) compressed nitrogen gun that makes the process greener and safer.

Using the most powerful X-ray-generating machine on the planet, researchers have reproduced what happens to matter just before it is devoured by a black hole. Their findings show that a long-standing theory regarding the giant gravitational sinkholes may be completely wrong.

Despite not getting the headlines it did last year, Zika remains an ongoing issue that needs addressing. A team from Sandia National Laboratories has developed a low-cost, portable device for quickly detecting Zika and similar viruses in a sample, driven by a smartphone app.

​Sandia National Laboratories is raising the stakes in its quest to develop fusion power by introducing tritium into its experiments with its Z machine. Tritium, the heaviest of the three hydrogen isotopes promises to boost energy output by a factor of 500.

In one more step on the road to a functional quantum computer, researchers at Harvard University and Sandia Ion Beam Laboratory claim to have created the very first "bridge" that could effectively link strings of quantum computers together in a single networked unit.

Capturing carbon emissions at the source is an important weapon in the fight against climate change​. Now scientists have developed an efficient low-cost technique that makes use of an ultra-thin membrane, like a bubble, to filter CO2 out of flue gas.

An international team of researchers has found a way to create microscopically-small lasers directly from silicon, unlocking the possibilities of direct integration of photonics on silicon, and a significant step towards light-based computers.

Sandia National Laboratories has revealed its plans for the extreme-scale Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor (SUMR). The turbines are built to deal with the extreme conditions of an offshore farm, featuring a folding build to cope with high winds.

In the exhibition area at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, a pair of humanoid prototypes built by SRI and Sandia National Laboratories hit the treadmills to demonstrate new technology that allows robots to operate longer on a single battery charge.

Earlier this year Sandia National Laboratories fired a nuclear warhead out of a cannon in New Mexico as part of a program to improve the longevity and effectiveness of the US nuclear stockpile.

Sandia National Laboratories is working its Mobile Imager of Neutrons for Emergency Responders (MINER) – a nuclear device detector capable of narrowing a search to within a city block without door-to-door sweeps.