ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | OCTOBER 2025 5 RESEARCH TRACKS NEW STEEL HANDLES HIGH TEMPS The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Tenn., set a new lab record with 20 R&D 100 Awards in this year’s competition, announced by R&D World magazine. The winning designs span a variety of fields, from advanced materials and additive manufacturing to energy storage and computing. Among the new technologies is nano eXtreme temperature steel (NeXT steel), a medium-carbon martensitic steel developed by ORNL in collaboration with Cummins Inc. It is designed to meet the demands of harsh environments in the energy and manufacturing sectors, including applications such as pistons in heavy-duty engines as well as dies and inserts used in high- pressure die casting and metalworking. NeXT steel offers higher strength and fatigue resistance, improved thermal conductivity, and greater environmental durability than traditional alloys. Compared to existing H-series tool steels, NeXT steel shows a 25–50% improvement in fatigue performance and elevated temperature softening resistance up to 600°C. The new material has been subjected to rigorous testing. NeXT steel pistons demonstrated exceptional durability by completing Cummins’ 500-hour peak power over- fuel test, which maintains the engine at full output while adding excess fuel to intensify combustion temperatures and cylinder pressures. It is also undergoing evaluation for use in fabri- cation and repair of higher- temperature manufacturing dies and other challenging applications. ornl.gov. EXPLORING ATOMIC PROPERTIES Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz, Germany, developed a new method to investigate the internal structure of atoms and discovered previously unknown atomic transitions in samarium. The ability to describe the internal structure of atoms is important not only for understanding the composition of matter, but also for exploring fundamental physics. However, the knowledge of the energy- level structure of many atoms remains incomplete, particularly in the case of the rare earth and actinide atoms. Spectroscopy is widely used to study atomic structure. “High- resolution, broadband spectroscopy is essential for precision measurements in atomic physics and the search for new fundamental interactions,” says researcher Razmik Aramyan. “But progress is often hindered by the difficulty of measuring complex atomic spectra, mainly due to two technical limitations: the difficulty of properly distinguishing the signals emitted by the sample and the limited range of wavelengths that instruments can detect.” Aramyan and his team further developed a method known as dual- comb spectroscopy (DCS), which allows measurement of atomic spectra at a wide band of electromagnetic frequencies with high resolution and high sensitivity. “This study introduces an enhanced multichannel DCS approach that combines a photodetector array with a novel scheme for resolving frequency ambiguities, enabling ambiguity-free, high-signal-to-noise-ratio broadband measurements,” explains Aramyan. He says this is the first step toward implementing Spectroscopy 2.0, an international project that aims to develop what is known as a “massively parallel spectroscopic tool,” one that can perform many spectroscopic measurements simultaneously. The team was able to record the spectrum of samarium vapor at different temperatures and analyze the spectral behavior at different samarium concentrations. When comparing their results with existing datasets, they found spectro- scopic lines that were previously unknown, illustrating the potential of the new method. www.uni-mainz.de. Prototype piston for diesel engines made of NeXT steel. Samarium cell at ~1040°C during the experiment.
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