Accelerator engineering

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.

Physicist Tor Raubenheimer explores the world by climbing rocks and designing particle accelerators.

Its electron beams will drive the generation of up to a million ultrabright X-ray flashes per second.

“The Worlds Within” and “Fabrication of the Accelerator Structure,” now available digitally in high fidelity, tell the story of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center’s inception and construction.

SLAC and Stanford researchers secure support for two projects that share one goal: to reduce the side effects of radiation therapy by vastly shrinking the length of a typical session.

An advisory committee is evaluating proposals for first experiments at SLAC’s future FACET-II accelerator facility.

The goal: develop plasma technologies that could shrink future accelerators up to 1,000 times, potentially paving the way for next-generation particle colliders and powerful light sources.

The new technology could allow next-generation instruments to explore the atomic world in ever more detail.

Planning the next big science machine requires consideration of both the current landscape and the distant future.

Innovations at SLAC, including the world’s shortest X-ray flashes, ultra-high-speed pulse trains and smart computer controls, promise to take ultrafast X-ray science to a whole new level.