Growing up in China shortly after the Cultural Revolution, Zhirong Huang may have been the only middle-school child in Beijing who knew anything about SLAC. Today he’s a notable innovator in the design of particle accelerators and free-electron lasers.

A 2-ton instrument the size of a compact car, now available at SLAC's X-ray laser, makes it possible to capture more detailed images of atoms, molecules, nanoscale features of solids, and individual particles such as viruses and airborne soot.

A study with SLAC's X-ray laser is a key step toward producing movies that show how a single molecule changes during a chemical reaction

New Technology Allows Faster, More Accurate Imaging of Hard-to-study Membrane Proteins

An international team led by scientists from two SLAC/Stanford institutes has devised a much faster and more accurate way of measuring subtle atomic vibrations that underlie important hidden properties of materials.

Researchers have found a new way to probe molecules and atoms with an X-ray laser, setting off cascading bursts of light that reveal precise details of what is going on inside, which could allow scientists to see details of chemical...

Marc Messerschmidt, a staff scientist at the Coherent X-ray Imaging (CXI) experimental station at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source X-ray laser, describes his daily work, which is far from routine.

A study shows for the first time that X-ray lasers can be used to generate a complete 3-D model of a protein without any prior knowledge of its structure.

Scientists in SLAC's Integrated Circuits Department reach a new frontier in ultrafast X-ray science with intricately designed signal-processing chips that translate particles of light into bits of data.

John Bozek, an instrument scientist at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source takes us behind the scenes at the Atomic, Molecular and Optical Science Instrument. AMO, which is housed in one of six experimental hutches at LCLS, uses the extremely short...

Scientists used the powerful X-ray laser at the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to create movies detailing trillionths-of-a-second changes in the arrangement of copper atoms after an extreme shock.

In a detailed study of how intense light strips electrons from atoms, researchers used an X-ray laser, SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), to measure and sort the ejected electrons and discover how this process takes place.