The Secretary celebrated LCLS-II first light with 600 SLAC staff and collaborators Oct. 26.

The award recognizes Driver’s contribution toward attosecond X-ray capabilities.

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, ultrafast phenomena that are key to a broad range of applications, from quantum materials to clean...

They used synthetic diamond crystals as mirrors to make X-ray pulses run laps inside a vacuum chamber, demonstrating a key process needed for future generations of performance-enhanced X-ray lasers.     

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

An upgrade to SLAC’s renowned Linac Coherent Light Source will allow it to deliver X-ray laser beams that are 10,000 times brighter with pulses that arrive up to a million times per second.

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

Once built, the system could produce fast X-ray pulses ten times more powerful than ever before.