Department of Energy | SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

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SLAC and Stanford Scientists Earn Department of Energy Research Awards

The Department of Energy has awarded two Stanford scientists funding through the agency’s Early Career Research Program.

SLAC Theorist Shares in Prestigious Physics Award

SLAC particle theorist Lance Dixon has been named co-winner of the 2014 J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, awarded each year by the American Physical Society.

SLAC Scientists Create Twisted Light

Scientists at SLAC have found a new method to create coherent beams of twisted light – light that spirals around a central axis as it travels. It has the potential to generate twisted light in shorter pulses, higher intensities and a much wider range of wavelengths, including X-rays, than is currently possible.

Shedding Light

In 1971, physicist Burton Richter of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was building a new type of particle collider called a storage ring. The lab’s two-mile-long linear accelerator—housed in what was then the longest building in the world—would shoot electrons and their antimatter twins, called positrons, into the 80-meter-diameter Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring, and SPEAR would set the beams of particles on a collision course. Richter and his colleagues stood by to examine the debris to see what discoveries came out.