Get Connected with U.S. Dept. of Energy User Facilities

Each user facility provides detailed information for new and returning users on the process of submitting a proposal and gaining access.  Some facilities allow for provisional rapid access. However since early 2020 the impacts of COVID-19 on each facility’s access protocols mean it is important to check for the latest information for user options. (Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of Science)

Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)

The ASCR program leads the nation and the world in supercomputing, high-end computational science, and advanced networking for science.

Basic Energy Sciences (BES)

Basic Energy Sciences supports fundamental research to understand, predict, and ultimately control matter and energy at the electronic, atomic, and molecular levels in order to provide the foundations for new energy technologies and to support DOE missions in energy, environment, and national security. The BES program also plans, constructs, and operates major scientific user facilities to serve researchers from universities, national laboratories, and private institutions. 

Biological and Environmental Research (BER)

The BER program supports transformative science and scientific user facilities to achieve a predictive understanding of complex biological, earth, and environmental systems for energy and infrastructure security, independence, and prosperity. The program seeks to understand the biological, biogeochemical, and physical processes that span from molecular and genomics-controlled scales to the regional and global scales that govern changes in watershed dynamics, climate, and the earth system.

Fusion Energy Sciences (FES)

The pursuit of fusion energy embraces the challenge of bringing the energy-producing power of a star to earth for the benefit of humankind. The promise is enormous—an energy system whose fuel is obtained from seawater and from plentiful supplies of lithium in the earth, whose resulting radioactivity is modest, and which yields zero carbon emissions to the atmosphere. With the support of FES, a devoted, expert, and innovative scientific and engineering workforce has been responsible for the impressive progress in harnessing fusion energy since the earliest fusion experiments over sixty years ago. As a result, we are on the verge of a new age in fusion science during which researchers will undertake fundamental tests of fusion energy’s viability. 

High Energy Physics (HEP)

The field of high energy physics is guided by intertwined science drivers to explore the elementary constituents of matter and energy, the interactions between them, and the nature of space and time. The Office of High Energy Physics (HEP) executes its mission through a program that advances three frontiers of experimental scientific discovery and related efforts in theory and computing. HEP develops new accelerator, detector and computational tools to enable the science, and through Accelerator Stewardship works to make accelerator technology widely available to science and industry.

Nuclear Physics (NP)

Through research, nuclear physicists are leading us on a journey of discovery into the nucleus of the atom – the very heart of matter. The goal is a roadmap of matter that will help unlock the secrets of how the universe is put together. This quest requires a broad approach to different, but related, scientific frontiers: improving our understanding of the building blocks of matter; discovering the origins of nuclei; and identifying the forces that transform matter. Stewardship of the field is shared with the National Science Foundation (NSF’s) Nuclear Physics Program. DOE and NSF fund almost all basic research in Nuclear Physics.