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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will restart operations in 2015, at higher energies and intensities than ever before.

stillframe public lecture starting from the bottom

Since it began operation in 2009, SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) has allowed scientists to make new types of X-ray measurements that were once thought unattainable by delivering one trillion X-ray photons – particles of X-ray light – in...

From social media to market analysis, people use pattern recognition and machine learning to sift through enormous amounts of data and reach new levels of understanding. Now scientists are using those same tools to track millions of individual molecules as...

Presented by Debbie Bard. One of the most surprising predictions made by Einstein's theory of relativity is that light doesn't travel through the universe in a straight line. The gravitational field of massive objects will deflect the path of light...

Spacetime and quantum mechanics are the pillars of our modern understanding of fundamental physics. But there are storm clouds on the horizon indicating that these principles are approximate, and must be replaced with something deeper. The union of quantum mechanics...

stillframe from public lecture about spacetime

In this talk, Eduardo do Couto e Silva will explain that while the night sky appears calm, it is in fact populated by colossal explosions and cosmic conflagrations.

Catalysts are the unsung heroes of chemistry: Widely used in industry, they speed up chemical reactions used to make everything from fertilizers to fuels to consumer products, and they do this by making those reactions much more efficient. Many important...

stillframe public lecture caught in the act

The universe is full of giant structures like galaxies and clusters of galaxies. What holds them together? Over the past century, many diverse observations indicate that the glue holding these objects together is the gravitational pull of an invisible, elusive...

Making the transition from fossil fuels to cleaner, renewable energy sources for the world’s automobile fleet will require dramatic improvements in rechargeable batteries: They will need to be lighter, less expensive, run 300-plus miles on a single charge and last...

stillframe public lecture x-rays reveal secret life of batteries

Presented by Kelly Gaffney. Movies have transformed our perception of the world. With slow motion photography, we can see a hummingbird flap its wings, and a bullet pierce an apple. The remarkably small and extremely fast molecular world that determines...

Presented by Sean Brennan. The Stardust mission returned from a 6-year voyage in January of 2006. During the mission it swept through the tail of comet Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt), collecting the microscopic particles streaming from it.

Presented by Sarah Church. The faint radio signal that fills our universe is the echo of the beginning of the universe. This signal, called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, was first detected by accident in 1964 but has since been...

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SLAC science explained

NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST

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Revealing the Secrets of Transistors using Supercomputers

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Starting From the Bottom: The Hunt for New Physics at the LHC

Now Playing: Molecular Movies

Quantum CSI: Profiling Molecules with X-rays

The Dark Universe Through Einstein's Lens

The End of Spacetime

The Violent Universe

Caught in the Act! Chemical Reactions Exposed

Cosmic Clue: The Dark Matter Mystery

X-rays Reveal Secret Life of Batteries

Making Molecular Movies: 10,000,000,000,000 Frames per Second

A Comet on Earth: Results from the Stardust Mission

Whispers of the Big Bang