Ever wonder what goes on behind SLAC's doors? Here is your chance to find out what SLAC is all about: the research, the facilities, and the people that make this world-class research institute what it is today.
Half of our universe appears to be missing, and scientists at SLAC and all over the world are trying to understand why. Don't miss this talk in which Steve Sekula will explain the core issues surrounding matter and anti-matter.
When we explore Nature at distances much smaller than the size of an atom, we find new and mysterious physical principles. At such small sizes, particles are governed by "quantum theory". Quantum theory tells us that some aspects of particle...
Black holes are everywhere in the Universe. They form when massive stars end their life in a simultaneous violent collapse and energetic explosion. Galaxies end up littered with small black holes, each roughly the mass of ten Suns. Nearly every...
Diamonds have been a prized material throughout history. They are scarce and beautiful, wars have been fought over them, and they remain today a symbol of wealth and power. Diamonds also have exceptional physical properties which can lead to unique...
For the past 60 years, progress in information technology has been governed by Moore's law, which states that the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip doubles every 18 months. However, this remarkable trend is drawing to a close...
Movies allow us to experience and understand worlds we may never be able to visit. During this presentation Bill Schlotter will explain how to make movies of magnetic storage bits, which reside in our laptops and internet data centers and...
This has been an exciting summer for particle physicists who have collectively spent the last forty years hunting for the Higgs boson. Last year, ATLAS and CMS, the two largest experiments analyzing collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider, observed...
Everyone knows that lasers can be bright. From Goldfinger to Star Wars, intense lasers carry a "death ray" reputation in popular culture. But what is intense light, anyway?
Presented by JoAnne Hewett. Extra dimensions of space may be present in our universe. Their discovery would dramatically change our view of the cosmos and would prompt many questions. How do they hide? What is their shape? How many are...
According to Smith, protein crystallography allows scientists to design drugs in a much more efficient way than the standard methods traditionally used by large drug companies, which can cost close to a billion dollars and take 10 to 15 years...
Plants have been doing it with ease for millions of years, and yet science has yet to fully comprehend how: Photosynthesis. It's a fundamental process of all plant life on Earth, using the simple and abundant ingredients of water and...