Genesis Mission (Challenge Area 8: Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery)

Genesis Mission (Challenge Area 8: Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery) is sponsored by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This challenge area addresses the fragility and scalability of quantum systems by using AI to understand and control causal relationships within quantum sensors, computers, and networks.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY # Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges Reenvisioning Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Productivity .....................................................................

1 Reimagining Construction and Operation of Buildings ................................................................................................. 2 Scaling the Biotechnology Revolution ....................................................................................................................................

3 Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply ....................................................................................................................... 4 Delivering Nuclear Energy that is Faster, Safer, Cheaper ............................................................................................

5 Accelerating Delivery of Fusion Energy ................................................................................................................................. 6 Transforming Nuclear Cleanup and Restoration................................................................................................................

7 Discovering Quantum Algorithms with AI............................................................................................................................ 8 Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery ..........................................................................................................................

9 Recentering Microelectronics in America .......................................................................................................................... 10 Securing U.S. Leadership in Data Centers ..........................................................................................................................

11 Accelerating Materials Discovery, Production, and Qualification for Strategic Deterrence .................... 12 Achieving AI-Driven Autonomous Laboratories .............................................................................................................. 13 Designing Materials with Predictable Functionality ......................................................................................................

14 Enhancing Particle Accelerators for Discovery ............................................................................................................... 15 Unifying Physics from Quarks to the Cosmos ..................................................................................................................

16 Predicting U.S. Water for Energy ............................................................................................................................................. 17 Scaling the Grid to Power the American Economy .......................................................................................................

18 Unleashing Subsurface Strategic Energy Assets ............................................................................................................ 19 Accelerating Nuclear Threat Assessment, Preparedness, and Response ........................................................ 20 Harnessing America’s Historic Nuclear Data and Research .

..................................................................................... 21 Increasing Experimental Capacity at Nuclear Research Facilities ....................................................................... .

22 Integrating Design and Production Operations for Nuclear Deterrence ........................................................... 23 Safeguarding Nuclear Materials from Proliferation Threats ..................................................................................... 24 Streamlining Production, Removing Red Tape, and Ensuring Safety in the Nuclear Enterprise ...........

25 Strengthening Deterrence Through Attribution of Nuclear and Radiological Signatures ........................

26 U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Reenvisioning Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Productivity Challenge: Bridging the gap between scientific discovery and commercially viable products and processes, known as the “valley of death”, remains the biggest challenge in industrial manufacturing.

The scaling, modification, or deployment of innovative materials and processes depends on a vast and complex parameter space, requiring the uncovering and integration of underlying physical and chemical principles that hold the key to the next United States (U.S.) manufacturing revolution.

AI Solution: Recent advancements in agentic and generative artificial intelligence (AI) present opportunities to accelerate discovery and translational science. These new tools could navigate multi-scale and high-dimensional dynamic systems to find hidden relationships and uncover new manufacturing routes and products.

AI can also enable end-to-end digital transformation of industrial manufacturing through integration of real-time data from machines, products, processes, and supply chains into digital twins for continuous human-in-the-loop automated decision support and deployment of emerging advanced manufacturing technologies.

Justification: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories co-locate world-leading expertise in the discovery, optimization, and scale-up of novel chemistry and materials for energy applications and in smart manufacturing, as well as operate cutting edge synthesis and characterization facilities and high-performance computing (HPC) resources.

At the same time, DOE has a long history of partnering with industry, which has helped cultivate data from industrial facilities. This creates an ideal environment to advance AI-driven manufacturing for U.S. industries today and in the future.

National Impact: Delivering innovations through an efficient, distributed, and adaptive platform capable of real-time decision making and end-to-end intelligence will profoundly transform how we create chemicals and materials foundational to industrial products and advanced energy technologies while strengthening supply chain resilience and competitiveness of American industry to create jobs and economic growth.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Reimagining Construction and Operation of Buildings Challenge: Building construction faces high costs and long timelines due to fragmented permitting and poor data interoperability. Then, when buildings are operational, sometimes faulty building controls can cause increased energy bills.

AI Solution: AI can transform the entire building lifecycle from design through operation by enabling breakthroughs in automated design, physics-based modeling, rapid permitting, and optimized maintenance. DOE will partner with machine learning and agentic platform developers, and collaborate with building owners, laboratories, construction companies, and others with data that can help validate and accelerate learning.

Justification: DOE's buildings expertise and national laboratory building science capabilities, along with its integrated building research infrastructure and public-private partnerships, make it uniquely suited to tackle this challenge. National Impact: This effort will reduce construction timelines and costs, increasing housing availability and affordability while making homes and commercial buildings less costly to operate.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Scaling the Biotechnology Revolution Challenge : Designing biology on demand to innovate in biotechnology and re-establish U.S. leadership will require accurately defining the essential governing principles—from atoms to molecules to organisms to ecosystems and back.

However, the nonlinear complexity of biological systems and long, costly development cycles hinder biotechnological innovations, impeding the delivery of crucial biofuels, biochemicals, and bioproducts vital for American economic prosperity and energy independence.

AI Solution : AI will integrate and interpret genomics, multi-omics, imaging, dynamics, and phenomics data into embedded models to establish genotype–phenotype relationships, identify causal control points, and guide autonomous experimentation. This will advance AI’s ability to reason about long causal chains under uncertainty, integrate across multiple scales, and learn from sparse, noisy data.

Tools like digital twins could be used to derisk process development, optimization, integration, and scale-up, thereby speeding up industrial production of biofuels, biochemicals, and bioproducts by orders of magnitude.

Justification: DOE is uniquely positioned to leverage its world-class molecular and genomic capabilities of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBNL) Joint Genome Institute, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, the specialized feedstock and conversion capabilities of the Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL) Biomass Feedstock National User Facility, the National Laboratory of the Rockies’ (NLR) Integrated Biochemical Refinement Facility & Process Development Unit, and the LBNL Advanced Biofuels/Bioproducts Process Development Unit facilities and HPC.

These DOE assets, combined with AI tools and digital twins, will enable predictive design of biological processes, products, and systems and rapid scale-up of biomanufacturing.

National Impact: Accelerating AI-driven biotechnology will position the U.S. to establish leadership in the biotechnology revolution by rapidly advancing the continuum from discovery to biomanufacturing scale-up, in areas spanning energy, bio-based domestic sources of critical minerals and materials (CMM), health, agriculture, and biosecurity, and will drive economic growth and job creation across the nation.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply Challenge: America's dependence on foreign supply chains for CMM threatens national security, economic competitiveness, and the deployment of technologies essential for energy independence.

Domestic critical mineral production is expensive, complex, and time-consuming, in part because of the many steps to identify, extract, refine, and concentrate from complex, heterogeneous sources across critical mineral supply chains.

AI Solution: AI will revolutionize the entire critical minerals supply chain and development of alternative materials by integrating geophysical data, other fundamental science data, process optimization, cost estimation, and economic modeling into one connected system.

Solving this challenge demands an AI that can reason scientifically, can understand complex structure-property relationships, and can design alternatives with different compositions. Physics-based AI offers advanced predictive capabilities to identify alternatives and understand processes underlying critical mineral availability, recovery, refinement, and replacement.

Justification: DOE's existing minerals characterization datasets (e.g., METALLIC, Critical Materials Innovation Hub), combined with DOE national laboratory expertise and DOE-supported efforts in materials science, chemistry, geosciences, biology, process engineering, and economic modeling, could enable acceleration from the years-long mineral development timelines to rapid resource assessment and production optimization.

Further, use of AI could reveal new strategies to replace and/or eliminate the need for CMMs in some materials and chemical processes. National Impact: This effort will reduce reliance on adversarial nations, expand America's mineral resource base, maximize production profitability, and strengthen supply chain resilience for technologies essential to national security and economic prosperity.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Delivering Nuclear Energy That is Faster, Safer, Cheaper Challenge: Nuclear power plants have historically been challenged by long development timelines and burgeoning costs, limiting America’s ability to deliver affordable, resilient, and reliable energy as demand continues to grow—particularly from AI data centers.

AI Solution : This initiative will accelerate nuclear energy deployment by using AI to design, license, manufacture, construct, and operate reactors with human-in-the-loop workflows, enabling at least 2x schedule acceleration and greater than 50% operational cost reductions. To meet these goals, we are using a suite of explainable AI solutions including surrogate models, agentic workflows, autonomous labs, and digitals twins.

For example, for reactor operations, we will use digital twin systems with AI components that will interpret complex operational data in real time.

Justification: DOE's combination of national laboratory nuclear expertise, test facilities (e.g., INL’s Advanced Test Reactor, Transient Reactor Test Facility, Fuel Conditioning Facility, Hot Fuel Examination Facility, and Collaborative Computing Center; Oak Ridge National Laboratory's High Flux Isotope Reactor; Argonne National Laboratory’s Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop Facility), decades of operational data, regulatory partnerships, industry partners, and extensive computational ecosystem uniquely position it to accelerate reactor deployment.

National Impact: This challenge will provide Americans more affordable energy while reducing human error, strengthening national security, and directly supporting U.S. energy dominance with multi-billion-dollar cost savings per gigawatt of generating capacity.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Accelerating Delivery of Fusion Energy Challenge: Realizing fusion energy on the grid requires coordinated progress across six tightly coupled challenge areas defined in the Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap.

1 Isolated, device-specific trial-and-error approaches cannot manage these interdependencies at the scale, complexity, or pace required to meet national energy objectives.

AI Solution: AI enables physics-constrained digital twins that integrate plasma, nuclear, materials, and system behavior within a unified predictive framework, allowing performance and engineering trade-offs, failure modes, and design margins to be evaluated consistently in simulation and experiment.

An AI-Fusion Digital Convergence Platform (DCP) will integrate novel algorithms in HPC codes, foundation models for plasma and materials science, physics- and chemistry-informed neural networks, surrogate models, and digital twins for whole-facility modeling and real-time control across the six Roadmap challenge areas.

The DCP will accelerate infrastructure development, shorten innovation cycles, and support a competitive U.S. fusion ecosystem. Justification: DOE uniquely brings together fusion facilities, national laboratories, leadership-class computing, data stewardship, and public-private partnerships to build and operate a trusted, national-scale AI platform that integrates data, models, and experiments across the fusion ecosystem.

That platform will leverage large-scale domestic and international fusion facilities and fusion materials and technology infrastructure including high-heat-flux testbeds, tritium and blanket test stands and loops, irradiation facilities, and in situ and in operando materials characterization capabilities across both public and private sectors to meet fusion roadmap milestones.

National Impact: The DCP would accelerate delivery of fusion energy as a source of firm, scalable baseload power, strengthening U.S. energy security and competitiveness. The Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap is available at energy. gov/fusion-energy.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Transforming Nuclear Cleanup and Restoration Challenge: DOE's environmental cleanup mission faces an estimated $540 billion liability over eight decades with ~90 million gallons of highly radioactive tank waste requiring treatment that impedes site remediation and restoration crucial for American energy, security, and innovation.

AI Solution: A multimodal AI foundation model will be trained on DOE Office of En vironmental Management's (EM) unparalleled 30+ years of operational data from unique nuclear processing facilities to predict scale-dependent behavior across lab, pilot, and full-scale systems. National laboratory experts will leverage Equinox supercomputing capabilities for accelerated simulation architecture in development of the AI models.

The goal is to use AI to enable mission acceleration to meet EM’s 2040 vision with significant liability reduction.

Justification: DOE EM's unique data assets from designing and operating large-scale facilities at complex sites (e.g., the Defense Waste Processing Facility and the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site (SRS)), combined with the capabilities provided by the industry partners, will enable development of scale-bridging AI models that safely and efficiently address deployment challenges (e.g., the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at the Hanford Site) no other institutions can leverage.

National Impact: This transformation will compress deployment timelines and accelerate nuclear remediation, thereby enabling renewed use of nuclear materials (for energy and medical applications) and infrastructure for American energy dominance.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Discovering Quantum Algorithms with AI Challenge: Discovering new quantum algorithms is an exceptionally difficult challenge due to the number of potential quantum operations and is highly counter-intuitive for human researchers to navigate.

U.S. leadership in the emerging quantum computing revolution will require accelerating the design and development of quantum algorithms (including those that capitalize on the convergence of classical HPC, AI, and quantum computers) that demonstrate scientific utility and a provable quantum advantage.

AI Solution: Novel AI could discover new quantum algorithms by automating and optimizing their design and translating them into applications without requiring prior domain knowledge. Furthermore, AI-powered platforms can translate high-level problem descriptions in natural language into executable quantum circuits, making algorithm design more accessible to researchers from various fields.

AI could help establish scientific workflows that leverage the interplay of classical and quantum resources, managing data flow and executing complex computations across platforms. Justification: There is strong evidence that quantum computers and algorithms will offer solutions to computational problems with high impact to the scientific community, beyond the limits of classical HPC and AI.

DOE hosts the most complete suite of scientific computing capabilities and these advances in quantum capability will enable computations that are classically intractable.

National Impact: The discovery of new quantum algorithms will have broad applications to science domains, such as fusion sciences, high energy physics, nuclear physics, materials science, and chemistry, with proposed commercial applications for the acceleration of drug, material, and chemical discovery.

This technological leap would not only bolster the nation's economy and security but also provide tools to address some of the most challenging scientific and societal problems.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery Challenge: Quantum systems for quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communication are poised to revolutionize discovery science by enabling unprecedented capabilities in modeling, simulation, and measurement.

The use of current quantum systems is severely limited by their fragility, scalability, and integration into existing infrastructure. The inherent challenge is the lack of understanding and control of the complex cause-and-effect relationships within a quantum system.

AI Solution: AI has shown its ability to process vast amounts of multimodal data, to recognize complex patterns and relationships, and to learn adaptively how to handle dynamic and unpredictable environments. This ability makes AI uniquely suited to help understand and control the delicate nature of complex quantum systems.

In quantum computing, AI will assist in real-time noise mitigation, adaptive error detection and correction, and system optimization and design. In quantum sensing, AI will optimize quantum entanglement, increase sensitivity, and control multi-sensor quantum networks. In quantum communication, AI will dynamically optimize multi-node quantum network design and control.

New AI approaches are needed for making real-time decisions under quantum uncertainty, learning control policies when observation is costly and destructive, predicting behavior from incomplete information, and adapting to drift in real-time. Justification: DOE is home to five National Quantum Information Research Centers in the U.S. working on overcoming limitations in quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communication.

The existing ecosystem is ideally suited to develop AI solutions to enable full quantum control. National Impact: The AI enabled understanding and control of complex quantum systems will accelerate the deployment of quantum technologies and accelerate their utilization for currently intractable challenges in scientific discovery and technology development.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Recentering Microelectronics in America Challenge: Microelectronics powers all aspects of our lives, including AI, but America faces intense global competition in critical microelectronics applications, including ultra-efficient semiconductors for AI computing, power electronics, and communication networks.

Microelectronics faces a tremendous scientific and technological challenge: designing and engineering the next generation of microelectronic devices and platforms that push the boundaries of miniaturization, processing speed, power consumption, thermal management, and operations environment.

AI Solution: An AI-driven full-stack co-design ecosystem will enable faster innovation cycles, de-risk new ultra-efficient manufacturing processes and component designs, and accelerate materials and manufacturing research and development (R&D), thereby leapfrogging foreign semiconductor technology.

Frontier AI coupled with heterogenous and multiscale data that is accessible via federated learning techniques will accelerate microelectronics research by revealing the critical relationships and tradeoffs between materials, devices, and workflows.

Justification: For decades, DOE has been at the leading edge of microelectronics research, both as a consumer and as an engine of scientific innovation with expertise in advanced materials, nanofabrication, and quantum-related technologies such as cryogenics, enabling many of the technological breakthroughs adopted by industry.

National Impact: Microelectronics continues to be at the heart of technological innovation, and every American will benefit from recentering leadership of the industry in the U.S. This effort will ensure sustained U.S. leadership in the global semiconductor landscape, enabling the rapid growth of domestic data centers, advancing beyond Moore's law for AI computing and national security applications, and securing other technological advantages—such as global leadership in 6G communication networks essential for economic prosperity and national security.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Securing U.S. Leadership in Data Centers Challenge: Winning the AI race will require accelerating the process of developing and deploying new data center technologies and energy management strategies to provide the extreme compute power for AI advancements, while ensuring secure, reliable, and affordable energy for consumers.

AI Solution: By leveraging AI/machine learning (ML), digital twins, and cyber-physical testbeds, we can rapidly de-risk advanced data center technologies and their grid integration, accelerating the time to deployment and supporting stakeholder needs including data center operators, equipment providers, communities, and utilities.

AI/ML can accelerate physics-based models to enable real-time digital twins, explore millions of deployment scenarios, and optimize under a unique constraint surface. Justification: This project leverages DOE's capacity to convene data center and utility stakeholders, the national laboratories’ research expertise in both load flexibility and computing, and their unique cyber-physical testbed facilities.

Specifically, the DOE already supports the Center of Expertise for Data Center Energy at LBNL, which can provide resources, including a variety of data sets on data center energy use, to aid this effort.

National Impact: By ensuring a robust capacity to develop cutting edge data center technologies and load management strategies, we will solidify U.S. intellectual and economic leadership in AI, driving prosperity and security while maintaining secure, reliable, and affordable energy for consumers.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Accelerating Materials Discovery, Production, and Qualification for Strategic Deterrence Challenge: The nuclear security enterprise faces significant hurdles in discovering, manufacturing, and qualifying mission-critical nuclear and non-nuclear materials.

This challenge will develop a digital, AI-accelerated workflow that connects the entire lifecycle of critical materials, from initial formulation to final production. This approach will incorporate real-time anomaly detection and in-process corrections to significantly reduce the need for extensive qualification testing and improve the safety and reliability of these critical materials.

It will also expedite new materials development, enabling opportunities to meet evolving military requirements.

AI Solution: Develop an AI-driven workflow that links material design, automated testing, and qualification into a single, data-driven process by using physics-based simulations on high -performance computers to screen and optimize material candidates, directing robotic labs and in -line sensors to run experiments, feed results back, and refine virtual performance models, and automatically assembling risk -based qualification packages that can be shared across sites for fast, coordinated approvals.

This workflow also includes automated AI agents that invent and test new plutonium purification methods and deliver only the best options to scientists for review, compressing a months -long development process into just days.

National Impact: Accelerating material development and certification will ensure the timely delivery of strategic components for deterrence, reduce reliance on fragile supply chains while lowering overall program costs, and provide a scalable model for safer, more efficient manufacturing in civilian sectors such as energy, chemicals, and aerospace.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Achieving AI-Driven Autonomous Laboratories Challenge: The pace of scientific discovery is influenced by the traditional, human-driven experimental process and the availability of non-deterministic AI-driven control tools to implement complex experimental designs in combinatorially large design parameter spaces.

These bottlenecks slow the cycle of hypothesis, experimentation, and discovery, leading to inefficient use of critical national assets and delaying scientific breakthroughs. Automating at least some parts of the scientific experimental scheme will both increase the volume of data produced for improved AI models and improve the repeatability of experiments.

AI Solution: Artificial intelligence will be integrated directly into the experimental workflow and data analysis, combining robotics, edge AI, real-time analysis and intelligent feedback, hypothesis generation, and data curation/sharing. Justification: These AI-driven laboratories will allow scientists to explore complex phenomena at an unprecedented rate and scale and are critical to achieving the Genesis Mission goals.

DOE’s user facilities and long-standing national laboratories have the infrastructure, capabilities, and expertise to serve as the nucleus for innovation with this type of high throughput discovery. National Impact: Accelerating discovery through AI-driven laboratories will directly advance U.S. scientific leadership and economic competitiveness.

This capability will speed up the development of novel materials and molecules for energy, next-generation computing, national security, and biotechnology. Like other challenges, it will also solidify the nation's position at the forefront of AI and scientific innovation, create a new paradigm for 21st-century research, and train a future workforce fluent in the integration of AI, data science, and experimentation.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Designing Materials with Predictable Functionality Challenge: Accelerating materials innovation will enable rapid deployment of advanced energy and industrial technologies that are essential for American competitiveness, from structural materials to materials for energy storage to other functional materials for advanced technologies.

The identification and commercialization of new materials with transformative properties that dramatically improve performance, energy efficiency, reliability, and resilience, however, is a time-and resource-intensive process due to the inherent complexity of materials science and the practical limitations of traditional simulations, synthesis, and characterization techniques that still require significant trial and error.

AI Solution: The convergence of current and emerging AI technology with the growing availability of large, curated datasets may be a tipping point for materials discovery, design, and qualification.

The development of physics-aware AI frameworks that exploit the complementary strengths of foundation models, deep learning, computer vision, generative AI, and agentic AI will enable entirely new capabilities for materials design that iteratively couple prediction, synthesis, characterization, and analysis to yield closed-loop learning systems that are interpretable, trustworthy, and capable of bridging large scales in space and time.

The ultimate goal of inverse design (designing materials for given property specifications) requires advanced experimental and simulation capabilities as well as AI reasoning and explainability.

Justification: DOE’s suite of world leading and unique experimental and computational capabilities for materials research, including X-ray light sources, neutron scattering facilities (and their associated characterization equipment), nanoscale science research centers, materials databases, and exascale computers, is collectively the most comprehensive and performant in the world.

These capabilities, along with the availability of very large materials data sets coupled with sustained investments in the development of AI-enabled physics-informed models, has positioned DOE to take a leadership role in implementing the materials by design vision.

National Impact: Tight integration of AI into the materials discovery-to-product workflow could significantly reduce time to market in manufacturing—from many years to decades down to months to a few years.

This acceleration will dramatically reduce development timelines for critical technologies including batteries, energy systems, structural and functional materials, strengthening American technological leadership and enabling faster deployment of innovations that create jobs and strengthen economic and national security.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Enhancing Particle Accelerators for Discovery Challenge: Modern particle accelerators are complex, requiring extensive human intervention that leads to high operating costs, operational variability, suboptimal experiment optimization, and inadequate data integration.

Further, the physical limitations of existing accelerator technologies slow progress in pushing the limits of resolution in space, time, and energy. Transforming accelerator-based facilities into highly efficient, autonomous, and more productive capabilities requires a tight integration of AI with design and operation.

AI Solution: Predicting chaotic beam dynamics, in which small perturbations cascade into major problems, could push AI to develop new capabilities in multi-scale temporal reasoning, physics-constrained learning, and robust uncertainty quantification. AI-driven digital twins that simulate complete beam dynamics in real time could dramatically reduce tuning time.

Collectively, facility-based AI will become adaptive and self-updating, significantly boosting performance, efficiency, and scientific output. Justification: DOE stewards one of the largest suites of accelerator-based experimental facilities in the world, with extensive operational data and a large, highly skilled workforce.

The optimization of the nation’s large-scale scientific infrastructure through AI-enabled design and the elimination of operational bottlenecks and cost inefficiencies will maximize the nation’s return on current and future infrastructure investments, revealing entirely new paradigms for scientific research through human-AI teaming and accelerating discovery.

National Impact: Accelerator-based facilities have been central to many of the most important discoveries of the 20 th and 21 st centuries. Integrating AI into accelerator design and optimization will increase the pace of future breakthroughs, enabling a deeper understanding of the universe, the development of new energy and computing technologies, and the creation of new techniques for the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Unifying Physics from Quarks to the Cosmos Challenge: The universe obeys only one set of rules, and scientists have hundreds of experiments targeting parts of that one set. Experiments range over distance scale (31 orders of magnitude), cost ($100k to $B), duration (fractions of a section to decades), and human investment (few to thousands).

We need a way to integrate the disparate experimental results with theoretical knowledge to accelerate discovery. AI Solution: High-energy physics and nuclear physics form a unique foundation to build AI reasoning models at unprecedented scale.

Developing AI that simultaneously learns from particle collisions, nuclear decays, and cosmological surveys will require breakthroughs in multi-modal learning and the ability to derive insights rather than merely recognize patterns.

An AI that internalizes the Standard Model could accelerate analysis by orders of magnitude, identify anomalies pointing to new physics, and propose theoretical extensions consistent with all data—a leap from pattern matching to physics reasoning.

Justification: DOE uniquely possesses the confluence of world-class scientific talent, stewardship of cutting-edge facilities, unparalleled access to experimental data, and a critical national mission to effectively address this challenge.

These facilities, alongside a broad portfolio of programs that explore the fundamental constituents and forces of the universe and delve into the nature of atomic nuclei, underscore DOE's singular ability to conduct large-scale, long-term, and high-impact scientific research.

National Impact: The acceleration of discovery, particularly in areas involving vast datasets from cutting-edge experiments, means we could reach breakthroughs much faster than previously possible, impacting our technological capabilities and quality of life in unforeseen ways.

Questions such as why is there more matter than antimatter, what is the nature of dark matter, and how do protons generate mass and spin address the nature of reality, and answering questions through advanced AI could have profound shifts in our philosophical and scientific understanding of the cosmos and our place within it.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Predicting U.S. Water for Energy Challenge: Water availability is essential for expanding production and utilization of energy, as well as the nation’s health and security.

However, there are fundamental scientific gaps in our understanding of terrestrial and atmospheric systems that limit our ability to predict water resources, especially on the time scale of weeks to years. AI Solution: AI capable of multi-scale temporal reasoning could tackle three inter-related grand challenges: cloud physics, surface and subsurface water flows, and the broader hydrologic cycle.

AI could improve, accelerate, and couple exascale-class modeling systems through advances in model initialization, and develop surrogates trained on DOE’s atmospheric and terrestrial observations and laboratory data, at a fraction of the computational cost of existing models. AI-based model diagnostics for enhanced analysis could refine a model-observational system aligned with decision-making needs.

Justification: DOE is the only agency with AI expertise, advanced computing, and integrated modeling capabilities (e.g., the DOE Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM), and infrastructure for field research necessary to meet the challenge of providing accurate information on surface and ground-water availability on the time scales of weeks to years.

National Impact: Solutions to these longstanding science challenges will radically improve America’s ability to anticipate water supply in the context of changing water availability, demands, energy technologies, and ambitions for energy expansion.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges # Scaling the Grid to Power the American Economy Challenge: The electric grid faces reliability challenges and infrastructure limitations to accommodate dramatic increases in electricity demand from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification while maintaining affordable power for Americans.

AI Solution : AI, using deep and reinforcement learning techniques on newly integrated big data sources, will reduce uncertainty, improve insights, and speed processes in grid planning, interconnection, operations, and security. This effort aims to enable 20-100x faster decision-making and at least 10% improvement in electricity cost and reliability.

Justification: The utility sector has critical grid data but a low risk tolerance, limited ability to develop new technology, and regional focus. DOE can bring integrated energy system expertise, computational facilities, and testbed infrastructure like the Critical Infrastructure Test Range Complex (CITRC) at INL and the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform at NLR.

The Department’s strong partnerships with grid operators can bring utility data together with these DOE capabilities to develop validated, deployable AI solutions. National Impact: This modernization will deliver lower-cost, more reliable power to American homes and businesses while strengthening energy security through faster deployment of grid capabilities and improved resilience against threats.

U.S. Department of Energy | Genesis Mission National Science