A cooperative agreement with Palo-Alto based CPI opens the door to routine commercial manufacturing of these powerful vacuum tube devices, which convert electron beams into microwaves that are used to accelerate subatomic particles.

Growing up in China shortly after the Cultural Revolution, Zhirong Huang may have been the only middle-school child in Beijing who knew anything about SLAC. Today he’s a notable innovator in the design of particle accelerators and free-electron lasers.

Teachers are using Google+ to bring their classes behind the scenes at national laboratories and to teach students about careers in STEM.

FACET postdoc Sébastien Corde has been recognized not once, not twice, not three times, but four times for his research into developing small, economical sources of X-rays using laser-plasma interactions.

In an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice.

Scientists at SLAC have found a new method to create coherent beams of twisted light – light that spirals around a central axis as it travels.

Dao Xiang, a SLAC accelerator physicist, has received an international award for his work on a technique for tuning an electron beam with a laser to produce X-ray pulses with more uniform and predictable properties.

Last Saturday marked the 40th anniversary of an historic event: In 1973, a team of research pioneers extracted hard X-rays for the first time from SLAC's SPEAR accelerator.

A tool developed half a century ago for sorting subatomic particles has been redesigned to measure X-ray laser pulses at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS).

John Hill watched with eager anticipation as controllers ramped up the power systems driving SLAC's X-ray laser in an attempt to achieve the record high energies needed to make his experiment a runaway success.

Two SLAC physicists with decades of particle accelerator experience helped a Silicon Valley company design and build X-ray devices that scan cargo containers for nuclear materials and other hazards.

SLAC researchers have demonstrated for the first time how to produce pairs of X-ray laser pulses in slightly different wavelengths, or colors, with finely adjustable intervals between them – a feat that will allow them to watch molecular motion as...