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Accelerators form the backbone of SLAC’s national user facilities. They generate some of the highest quality particle beams in the world, helping thousands of scientists perform groundbreaking experiments each year.

Linac towards SLAC campus

News Feature

Scientists developed a new method to unlock the secrets of RNA. The implications are wide-reaching, from better understanding diseases to designing new therapeutics. 

CXI hutch
News Brief

Scientists developed a groundbreaking technology that allows them to see sound waves and microscopic defects inside crystals, promising insights that connect ultrafast atomic motion...

CXI hutch
Press Release

With up to a million X-ray flashes per second, 8,000 times more than its predecessor, it transforms the ability of scientists to explore atomic-scale...

LCLS-II first light
News Feature

Sebek’s extraordinary career at SSRL includes helping build the facility’s original electron injector back in the 1980s and working on almost all of its...

This photograph shows 2023 Lytle award winner Jim Sebek at work on SSRL's electrical systems.
News Feature

X-ray laser studies help researchers identify early steps in the freezing process to better understand how clouds make ice and their effect on climate.

supercooled water droplets
News Feature

Leora Dresselhaus-Marais, Claudio Emma,  Bernhard Mistlberger and Johanna Nelson Weker will pursue cutting-edge research into decarbonizing steel production, theoretical physics, generating more intense particle...

This photo shows all four recipients from SLAC and Stanford of the DOE's 2023 Early Career Award
News Feature

Bringing ultrafast physics to structural biology has revealed the coordinated dance of molecules in unprecedented clarity, which could aid in the design of new...

molecular control
News Feature

The facility is now one step away from releasing an unprecedented stream of ultra-bright X-rays.

This is a graphic representation of electron bunches travelling through SLAC's linear accelerator.
News Feature

The long – but not too long – cavity would ping-pong X-ray pulses inside of a particle accelerator facility to help capture nature’s fastest...

This cartoon figure shows how the cavity-based X-ray free electron laser works in general. The electron beam (blue) travels through an undulator (brown), which causes the beam to release X-ray pulses. These pulses bounce around a set of four mirrors, helping them become coherent, before they continue down the accelerator to experimental halls.
Press Release

After decades of effort, scientists have finally seen the process by which nature creates the oxygen we breathe using SLAC’s X-ray laser.

Photosystem II
News Feature

The algorithm pairs machine-learning techniques with classical beam physics equations to avoid massive data crunching.

This is a representation of a particle beam traveling through an accelerator.