Thirty undergraduate students from around the country conducted hands-on research at SLAC this summer through the Department of Energy’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program.
Aleksandra Vojvodic has been named one of MIT Technology Review’s 2016 Innovators Under 35, which honors exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to transform the world. A staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, she has spent the past six years working at the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, where she uses theory and computation to help design better catalysts for reactions that generate and store clean energy.
A recent paper published in Nature Communications reveals insights about the element actinium that could support new classes of anticancer drugs. The experiment was conducted by the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in collaboration with the DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have created a nanostructured device, about half the size of a postage stamp, that disinfects water much faster than the UV method by also making use of the visible part of the solar spectrum, which contains 50 percent of the sun’s energy.
Researchers working with more than six years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have used novel approaches to search for cosmic signals that could reveal what mysterious dark matter is made of. The scientists looked for hypothetical axion particles, studied the gamma-ray emissions from a large satellite galaxy of our Milky Way and analyzed the faint glow of gamma rays that covers the entire sky.
A 3-D sky-mapping project that will measure the light of 35 million cosmic objects has received formal approval from the Department of Energy to move forward with construction. Installation of the project, called Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), is set to begin next year at the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, with observations starting up in January 2019.
An interdisciplinary team has developed a way to track how particles charge and discharge at the nanoscale, an advance that will lead to better batteries for all sorts of mobile applications.
All material things appear to be made of elementary particles that are held together by fundamental forces. But what are their exact properties? Questions with cosmic implications like these drive many of the scientific efforts at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Three distinguished particle physicists have joined the lab over the past months to pursue research on two particularly mysterious forms of matter: neutrinos and dark matter.
Scientists are installing new mirrors to improve the quality of the X-ray laser beam at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
A newly formed Battery500 consortium, including researchers from Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, will receive up to $10 million each year for the next five years to develop a new battery technology that could make electric vehicles go two to three times farther and make them less expensive.
Plans begin decades in advance for a tremendous effort such as the first manned mission to Mars. The details are as fine – and essential – as how astronauts will breathe and eat and track their health.
Scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have collaborated with a local startup company to turn a novel tabletop laser – one that produces extreme ultraviolet light at unprecedented energies and pulse rates for studies of complex materials – into a commercial product.
Scientists from Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are using powerful X-rays to study high-performance mirror coatings that could help make the LIGO gravitational wave observatory 10 times more sensitive to cosmic events that ripple space-time.
A new X-ray laser experimental station at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory recently welcomed its first research group, scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Four graduate students working on innovative accelerator technologies at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have been awarded Robert H. Siemann Graduate Fellowships in Physics. Established in memory of long-time SLAC accelerator physicist and Stanford faculty member Robert Siemann, the fellowship provides funding to outstanding graduate students doing accelerator research at the lab.
Jaden Morgan, a 13-year-old rising freshman who will attend Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose this fall, had heard about SLAC's legendary 2-mile-long accelerator but had never been to the lab. This summer he had the chance to see the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory facilities up close and hear how they are used to explore the world at the level of atoms and molecules.
Our universe came to life nearly 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang — a tremendously energetic fireball from which the cosmos has been expanding ever since. Today, space is filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies, including our solar system's own galactic home, the Milky Way. But how exactly did the infant universe develop into its current state, and what does it tell us about our future?
A new device at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory allows researchers to explore the properties and dynamics of molecules with circularly polarized, or spiraling, light.
In experiments at two Department of Energy national labs – SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – scientists at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have experimentally confirmed critical aspects of how a new type of microelectronic device, the memristor, works at an atomic scale.
Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have developed a method that could open up new scientific avenues by making the light from powerful X-ray lasers much more stable and its color more pure.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and Louisiana State University have achieved an even more dramatic HHG shift by shining an infrared laser through argon gas that’s been frozen into a thin, fragile solid whose atoms barely cling to each other.
A team led by scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has reached another milestone in developing a promising technology for accelerating particles to high energies in short distances: They created a tiny tube of hot, ionized gas, or plasma, in which the particles remain tightly focused as they fly through it.
Prototyping of a new, ultrasensitive “eye” for dark matter is making rapid progress at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory: Researchers and engineers have installed a small-scale version of the future LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) detector to test, develop and troubleshoot various aspects of its technology.
Alex Aiken, director of the new Computer Science Division at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has been thinking a great deal about the coming challenges of exascale computing, defined as a billion billion calculations per second. That’s a thousand times faster than any computer today. Reaching this milestone is such a big challenge that it’s expected to take until the mid-2020s and require entirely new approaches to programming, data management and analysis, and numerous other aspects of computing.
Researchers have made the first microscopic movies of liquids getting vaporized by the world’s brightest X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The new data could lead to better and novel experiments at X-ray lasers, whose extremely bright, fast flashes of light take atomic-level snapshots of some of nature’s speediest processes.
In this Q&A, three researchers from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, explain the circumstances of Hitomi’s tragic accident and express their hopes for future X-ray satellite missions.
Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory jointly run the world's leading program for isolating and studying diamondoids — the tiniest possible specks of diamond. Found naturally in petroleum fluids, these interlocking carbon cages weigh less than a billionth of a billionth of a carat (a carat weighs about the same as 12 grains of rice); the smallest ones contain just 10 atoms.
Researchers have made a giant leap forward in taking snapshots of these ultrafast reactions in a bacterial light sensor. Using the world’s most powerful X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, they were able to see atomic motions as fast as 100 quadrillionths of a second – 1,000 times faster than ever before.
Since the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory powered up its “linac” half a century ago, the 2-mile-long particle accelerator has driven a large number of successful research programs in particle physics, accelerator development and X-ray science. Now, the historic particle highway is getting a makeover that will pave the way for more groundbreaking research.
Using data from the world’s most powerful X-ray laser at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, an international team of scientists has made a crucial advance in analyzing ultrafast motions of molecules. They developed a computational method that increases the accuracy of this analysis 300 times – to one femtosecond, which is a millionth of a billionth of a second.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are working with a major manufacturer to make klystrons – big vacuum tubes that generate microwaves for accelerating particles – much more energy efficient.
While the supply of accelerator physicists in the United States has grown modestly over the last decade, it hasn’t been able to catch up with demand fueled by industry interest in medical particle accelerators and growing collaborations at the national labs.
Creating the batteries or electronics of the future requires understanding materials that are just a few atoms thick and that change their fundamental physical properties in fractions of a second. Cutting-edge facilities at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have allowed researchers like Aaron Lindenberg to visualize properties of these nanoscale materials at ultrafast time scales.
Conditions in the vast universe can be quite extreme: Violent collisions scar the surfaces of planets. Nuclear reactions in bright stars generate tremendous amounts of energy. Gigantic explosions catapult matter far out into space. But how exactly do processes like these unfold? What do they tell us about the universe? To find out, researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory perform sophisticated experiments and computer simulations that recreate violent cosmic conditions on a small scale in the lab.
Many bacteria interact with their environment through hair-like structures known as pili, which attach to and help mediate infection of host organisms, among other things. Now a U.S.-Japanese research team, including scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has discovered that certain bacteria prevalent in the human gut and mouth assemble their pili in a previously unknown way – information that could potentially open up new ways of fighting infection.
Gravity: we barely ever think about it, at least until we slip on ice or stumble on the stairs. To many ancient thinkers, gravity wasn’t even a force—it was just the natural tendency of objects to sink toward the center of Earth, while planets were subject to other, unrelated laws.
Scientists have made a significant advance toward making movies of extremely fast atomic processes with potential applications in energy production, chemistry, medicine, materials science and more. Using a superfast, high-resolution “electron camera,” a new instrument for ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, researchers have captured the world’s fastest UED images of nitrogen molecules rotating in a gas, with a record shutter speed of 100 quadrillionths of a second.
Construction begins today on a major upgrade to a unique X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The project will add a second X-ray laser beam that’s 10,000 times brighter, on average, than the first one and fires 8,000 times faster, up to a million pulses per second.
The silver electrical contacts that carry electricity out of about 90 percent of the solar modules on the market are also one of their most expensive parts. Now scientists from two Department of Energy national laboratories have used X-rays to observe exactly how those contacts form during manufacturing.
With a combination of theory and clever, meticulous gel-making, scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Toronto have developed a new type of catalyst that’s three times better than the previous record-holder at splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen – the vital first step in making fuels from renewable solar and wind power.
BICEP3, the upgraded version of BICEP2, began collecting data yesterday. The first observations using the fully updated equipment will run through November.
In experiments carried out partly at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, scientists have determined in atomic detail how a potential drug molecule fits into and blocks a channel in cell membranes that Ebola and related “filoviruses” need to infect victims’ cells.
Here are five ways SLAC’s X-ray laser and the science it enables can impact our future.
Although the star-covered night sky is regarded by many as a synonym of serenity, the cosmos is in fact a rather hostile place. It hosts many extreme environments that would instantaneously eradicate any life nearby. A new space mission is about to reveal this violent nature in greater detail than ever before: On Feb. 17, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched its ASTRO-H satellite – a very precise and sensitive eye for X-rays emerging from hot and energetic processes in space.
At the annual SLAC Regional DOE Science Bowl on Saturday, Lynbrook High School pulled off a repeat performance of their 2015 win, earning a return trip to the National Science Bowl, which will be held in Washington, D.C., April 28 - May 2.
Often the most difficult step in taking atomic-resolution images of biological molecules is getting them to form high-quality crystals needed for X-ray studies of their structure. Now researchers have shown they can get sharp images even with imperfect crystals using the world’s brightest X-ray source at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will take part in a discussion of the global hunt for dark matter at this year’s AAAS Annual Meeting, to be held Feb. 11-15 in Washington, D.C.
Dark matter hunters around the world pursue three approaches to look for fingerprints of ghostly WIMPs: on the Earth’s surface, underground and in space. Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will take part in a discussion of the global search for dark matter particles at this year’s AAAS Annual Meeting, to be held Feb. 11-15 in Washington, D.C.
Researchers assumed that tiny objects would instantly blow up when hit by extremely intense light from the world’s most powerful X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. But to their astonishment, these nanoparticles initially shrank instead – a finding that provides a glimpse of the unusual world of superheated nanomaterials that could eventually also help scientists further develop X-ray techniques for taking atomic images of individual molecules.
Scientists have been trying for years to make a practical lithium-ion battery anode out of silicon, which could store 10 times more energy per charge than today’s commercial anodes and make high-performance batteries a lot smaller and lighter. But two major problems have stood in the way: Silicon particles swell, crack and shatter during battery charging, and they react with the battery electrolyte to form a coating that saps their performance.
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