Los Alamos National Laboratory

Research scientist Sangeeta Negi has been named Los Alamos National Laboratory’s 2026 Battelle Inventor of the Year for her work developing a biological solution aimed at improving crop growth and agricultural productivity. Battelle manages eight national laboratories across the U.S. The Battelle Inventor of the Year Award recognizes a researcher at each of these labs whose inventions demonstrate exceptional creativity, scientific impact and success in moving technologies beyond their laboratory.

The National Postdoctoral Association recently named Los Alamos National Laboratory as one of 12 institutions demonstrating exemplary commitment to advancing the postdoctoral experience as part of its first-annual Institutional Policy Awards. A postdoctoral scholar, or “postdoc,” is an individual holding a doctoral degree who is engaged in a temporary period of mentored research to acquire the professional skills needed to pursue a career path of their choosing.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have demonstrated a new quantum-dot mechanism that could significantly expand the reach of light-driven chemistry. By introducing magnetic manganese dopants into semiconductor quantum dots, the team created an ultrafast spin-exchange pathway that captures hot-electron energy before it is lost as heat and uses it to drive chemical reduction.

The emerging technology of advanced nuclear microreactors offer solutions to many modern energy challenges. The ZiaCore design, a low-enriched uranium dioxide-fueled microreactor developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, now joins several developing concepts for fission-based nuclear power microreactors achieving initial criticality.

By Brad Beck and Bob Putnam Each summer, Los Alamos National Laboratory hosts more than 1,800 students and postgraduate interns. In 2026, for the first time, the Plutonium Workforce Development Institutional Partnerships (PWDI) program will pay for more than 30 of those students to come to the Laboratory.

Thanks to the generosity of Laboratory employees, this year's Los Alamos Employees' Scholarship Fund campaign made a substantial contribution toward increasing opportunities for students across Northern New Mexico. The campaign exceeded its goal of 50 new recurring donors, with 58 employees activating new biweekly contributions during the campaign period.

The Autonomous Ion Mass Spectrometer Sentry (AIMSS) team at Los Alamos National Laboratory celebrated the launch of their space flight payload to the International Space Station on May 15. The AIMSS payload was launched as a part of the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program Houston-11 mission onboard SpaceX’s 34th Dragon Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-34) mission.

In the 1940s, as Los Alamos scientists raced to unlock and harness the physics of fission, a parallel scientific revolution was taking shape, one that would take nuclear science from splitting atoms to saving lives: biomedical isotopes. The science of isotopes was fundamental to the mission at Los Alamos from day one. Some isotopes fission readily, like the uranium used in nuclear reactors (U-235), while others don’t, like the uranium found in nature (U-238). The difference boils down to neutrons.

By 1970, fourteen years after Los Alamos scientists first proved the existence of the neutrino, they knew something was amiss: an underground neutrino experiment built inside the Homestake Mine, an enormous active gold mine in South Dakota, was detecting way fewer neutrinos coming from the Sun than scientists had predicted, and they didn’t know why. Neutrinos are famously elusive elementary particles. They are electromagnetically neutral and nearly massless, making them extremely hard to detect.

In 1991, Los Alamos physicist Paul Ginsparg had a problem with how research findings were shared, or not, within the scientific community. New findings were slow to publish, and access was exclusive, hindering creativity and collaboration. And he wasn’t alone; it was increasingly apparent that physicists needed a faster and more equitable way to share results.