SLAC is truly a multi-purpose laboratory. Established in 1962 as a particle physics center, the laboratory has expanded over the years to include some of the world's leading photon science and astrophysics institutes.
Photon science, the study of matter through its interaction with light, is the most rapidly expanding area of research at SLAC. The laboratory's Photon Science research program includes:
LCLS
In 2009, the Linac Coherent Light Source will begin taking the first stop-motion movies of atoms and molecules in action and will create and study exotic states of matter. The LCLS will be the world's first source of intense hard X-ray laser light and will have the ability to watch the molecules of life in action, view chemical bonds forming and breaking, and explain how materials work on the quantum level.
LUSI
The LCLS Ultrafast Science Instruments project is building a suite of X-ray instruments for the LCLS, making the most use of the unique scientific capability of this exceptional machine.
PULSE
A joint venture with Stanford University, the Photon Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering institute focuses on ultrafast structural and electronic dynamics in atomic physics, chemistry, biology and physics, pushing the frontiers of LCLS performance.
SIMES
The Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science addresses key challenges in the areas of condensed matter physics and materials science, elucidating the electronic and atomistic structure, collective behavior and dynamics of materials and their interfaces. This understanding is the basis for new clean and economical energy with reduced environmental impacts and other technologies important to our society.
SSRL
The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource creates synchrotron X-ray light by bending the path of electrons traveling the speed of light around a storage ring. The extremely bright X-rays can be used to view the nanoworld, leading to discoveries in fields including solid-state physics, materials science, environmental sciences, structural biology and chemistry.
SLAC uses both accelerator and non-accelerator based experiments to probe the nature of the fundamental constituents and forces operating in the Universe. The laboratory's Particle Physics and Astrophysics program includes:
ARD
The Accelerator Research Division is pursuing novel ways to accelerate particles to higher speeds in shorter distances than has ever before been achieved. Key activities include studies of the ultimate acceleration gradients that can be achieved with radio-frequency structures, and investigations using beam-plasma interactions and laser-dielectric interactions to provide intense accelerating fields.
ATLAS
SLAC plays an important role in the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) experiment on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a particle physics laboratory located on the Franco-Swiss border. SLAC serves as a Tier 2 computing center for ATLAS, and has been involved in designing and building the pixel detector and high-level trigger systems for this experiment.
BaBar
The BaBar experiment seeks to understand the violation of CP (charge parity) symmetry, the fundamental symmetry of nature that may explain why the universe contains more matter than antimatter. BaBar has shown that nature violates this symmetry in various surprising ways, but that it is not enough to explain all of the missing antimatter. BaBar has also led to a vastly increased understanding of how quarks interact with one another, and has the potential to find signs of new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.
Elementary Particle Theory
The SLAC Theoretical Physics Group works on virtually all areas of high-energy physics, from the development of fundamental theories and concepts to detailed tests of these theories at colliders and other experimental facilities. A very close and unique collaboration exists between the experimental and the theoretical efforts at SLAC, providing an exciting and stimulating research environment.
EXO
The Enriched Xenon Observatory is an underground observatory that will search for something never before seen: a neutrinoless double beta decay, which would prove that neutrinos are their own anti-particles, and provide an unambiguous measurement of neutrino masses.
FGST
SLAC helped build the newest major space observatory, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Launched into orbit in June 2008, the telescope studies some of the most energetic processes in the universe, beyond the reach of Earth-bound accelerator facilities.
Geant4
The Geant4 collaboration has created an evolving software toolkit for the simulation of particle interactions in complex devices. Geant4 is widely used in high energy physics, space and medicine. The SLAC Geant4 group has a major role in Geant4, leading the work on hadronic physics, visualization and overall software architecture.
ILC
The International Linear Collider, a proposed new electron-positron particle collider, will allow physicists to explore energy regions well beyond the reach of today's accelerators. At those energies, researchers anticipate significant discoveries that will lead to a radical new understanding of dark matter, extra spatial dimensions and fundamental symmetries in nature.
JDEM
SLAC is currently working in collaboration with several other institutions on The Joint Dark Energy Mission to explore the properties of dark energy and measure how cosmic expansion has changed over time.
KIPAC
At the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, SLAC and Stanford researchers explore the most fascinating and challenging topics in astrophysics and cosmology that have direct relevance to high-energy physics—everything from black holes and neutron stars to dark matter and dark energy.
LARP
SLAC is currently involved in several accelerator development projects for the Large Hadron Collider through the LHC Accelerator Research Program, a consortium of SLAC, Brookhaven, Fermi and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.
LSST
SLAC is leading the R & D effort for the 3.2 gigapixel camera planned for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a wide-field, ground-based facility that will take deep images of the entire accessible sky every few nights. LSST will allow us to track the evolution of the universe and provide important clues as to the nature of dark matter and dark energy.