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The Universe appears to be flat, accelerating and lightweight. In this talk, I will explain what these terms mean, how we developed this view and its implications. I will also discuss the connection between cosmology and particle physics experiments being...

stillframe from public lecture the runaway universe

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...

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...

An exploding star, or supernova, is one of the most violent events in the universe, giving off a billion stars' worth of light. Even thousands of years later, the remnants of these explosions are among the most beautiful and mysterious...

Perhaps the most significant event in intellectual history has occurred over the past several decades, a convergence of the sciences, a blurring of the distinctions between disciplines, from physics to chemistry to biology. Fundamental questions about human existence have been...

Archimedes (287-212 BC), who is famous for shouting 'Eureka' (I found it) is considered one of the most brilliant thinkers of all times. The 10th-century parchment document known as the “Archimedes Palimpsest” is the unique source for two of the...

Most people have intuitive associations with the word "magnetism" based on everyday life: refrigerator magnets, the compass, north and south poles, or someone's "magnetic personality". Few people, however, realize how complicated the phenomenon really is, how much research still deals...

Physical Attraction: The Mysteries of Magnetism

Water, H2O, is familiar to everyone - it shapes our bodies and our planet. But despite its abundance, water has remained a mystery, exhibiting many strange properties that are still not understood. Why does the liquid have an unusually large...

The Mary Rose, built in 1511, was the flagship of King Henry VIII. She sank in 1545 while en route to confront the French fleet in battle. The ship lay undersea for 440 years before being raised in 1985. The...

Andrea Foster uses x-rays to determine the forms of potentially toxic elements in environmentally-important matrices such as water, sediments, plants, and microorganisms. In this free public lecture, Foster will discuss her research on arsenic, which is called the silent killer...

Presented by Clyde Smith. When our grandparents were young, there was no such thing as an antibiotic. Diseases like tuberculosis were invariably fatal. In the twentieth century, the fortuitous discoveries of penicillin from a mold and streptomycin from soil made...

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...

Who we are

SLAC science explained

NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST

Careers at SLAC

Revealing the Secrets of Transistors using Supercomputers

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The Runaway Universe

Smashing Protons: First Physics at the LHC

Molecules in the Spotlight

Supernova Shock Waves: Powerhouses of the Galaxy

From Atoms to Animals: The Vital Force in Biology

Archimedes: Accelerator Reveals Ancient Text

Physical Attraction: The Mysteries of Magnetism

Water: The Strangest Liquid

Saving the Mary Rose: Synchrotrons and the Preservation of a Tudor Warship

Arsenic: The Silent Killer

Chasing Super Bugs with Smarter Drug Design

Leading the Charge: Exotic New Materials for Future Devices