Events archive

Accelerators are huge, expensive tubes sometimes miles long that produce high energies for smashing protons or making intense X-ray light. 21st-century technology has taken us from the room-sized ENIAC to microprocessors that fit in your pocket. Can the same be...

UPDATE - In the time following this lecture, aspects of the research featured here have been disproven or come into question. See this article from Chemical & Engineering News for important context before viewing this archival SLAC public lecture. -------...

Some 150 million years ago, a strange creature died in a tropical lagoon that today is located in Bavaria, Germany. In 1861, a single feather of this creature was discovered. Not long afterward, a complete fossil was found with the...

The Large Hadron Collider, at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, is the largest scientific instrument ever built. For nearly a year now, we have been smashing protons into each other with unprecedented energy, allowing us to peer into nature's most intimate...

How will we improve computer technology to create chips that are smaller, faster, and more efficient? For leaps in performance, we need to create new types of semiconductors. In this lecture, the speaker will describe a new class of materials...

Diamonds exist in all sizes, from the Hope Diamond to minuscule crystals only a few atoms across. The smallest of these diamonds are created naturally by the same processes that make petroleum. Recently, researchers discovered that these "diamondoids" are formed...

Among the many beautiful, unexpected and sometimes revolutionary discoveries to emerge from subatomic physics, probably none is more bizarre than an elementary particle known as the "neutrino". More than a trillion of these microscopic phantoms pass unnoticed through our bodies...

Presented by James Cryan. SLAC has just unveiled the world's first X-ray laser, the LCLS. This machine produces pulses of X-rays that are ten billion times brighter than those from conventional sources. One of the goals of this machine is...

SLAC has converted its giant particle accelerator into the world's first X-ray laser. By a billion fold the world's brightest X-ray source, the laser packs a trillion photons into pulses as short as a millionth of a billionth of a...

Presented by Wendy Mao. The deeper we go into the Earth, the higher the pressure. At the pressures found within the center of our planet, minerals do not simply compress. Pressure dramatically alters all materials properties, in the process creating...

Who we are

SLAC science explained

Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Shocking to the Core: Adventures in Earth Science

Particle Accelerator on a Chip

Life Redefined: Microbes Built with Arsenic

Archaeopteryx: Bringing the Dino-Bird to Life

Smashing Protons: First Physics at the LHC

Leading the Charge: Exotic New Materials for Future Devices

Ultimate Atomic Bling: Nanotechnology of Diamonds

Deep Secrets of the Neutrino: Physics Underground

Molecules in the Spotlight

ZAP! The X-Ray Laser is Born

Journey to the Center of the Earth