The second phase of a major upgrade project is now online at SLAC’S Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). On Saturday, scientists ushered an electron beam through a new undulator to produce “soft” X-rays (left). This follows the upgraded facility’s first...
FACET-II is the only facility in the world capable of providing high-energy electron and positron beams for researching a vast array of revolutionary accelerator technologies that could shrink future accelerators by factors of 100 to 1,000 and sharpen their capabilities.
Over the course of two years, crews at SLAC installed a state-of-the-art high brightness electron source and new electron bunch compressor systems for producing intense beams.
An illustration shows polarons – fleeting distortions in a material’s atomic lattice ––in a promising next-generation energy material, lead hybrid perovskite.
As this animation shows, polaronic distortions start very small and rapidly expand outward in all directions to a diameter of about 5 billionths of a meter, which is about a 50-fold increase. This nudges about 10 layers of atoms slightly...