One of the greatest challenges humanity faces is finding a way to provide the world's population with clean energy. Since sunlight is our most abundant source of energy, solar cells, which absorb sunlight and create electricity, will become increasingly important...

Astronomers infer that the universe contains huge amounts of a mysterious, invisible substance called "dark matter". To account for the structure of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the universe must contain six times more dark matter than ordinary atomic matter...

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...