Accelerator engineering

At the Machine Shop, Pete Franco crafts beautiful, intricate and precise parts for the lab’s latest scientific tools.

FACET-II will pave the way for a future generation of particle colliders and powerful light sources, opening avenues in high-energy physics, medicine, and materials, biological and energy science.

Daniel Ratner, head of SLAC’s machine learning initiative, explains the lab’s unique opportunities to advance scientific discovery through machine learning.

It uses terahertz radiation to power a miniscule copper accelerator structure.

This leap in capability will allow scientists to investigate quantum and chemical systems more directly than ever before.

Marking the beginning of the LCLS-II era, the first phase of the major upgrade comes online.

Researchers have squeezed a high-energy electron beam into tight bundles using terahertz radiation, a promising advance in watching the ultrafast world of atoms unfold.

SLAC scientists and collaborators are developing 3D copper printing techniques to build accelerator components.

Just as engineers once compressed some of the power of room-sized mainframes into desktop PCs, so too have the researchers shown how to pack some of the punch delivered by today’s ginormous particle accelerators onto a tiny silicon chip.

Called XLEAP, the new method will provide sharp views of electrons in chemical processes that take place in billionths of a billionth of a second and drive crucial aspects of life.