Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS)

A team of electrical designers develops specialized microchips for a broad range of scientific applications, including X-ray science and particle physics.

This summer, five graduate students from the University of Puerto Rico had the opportunity to use SLAC’s world-class facilities to keep their studies on track.

A new imaging technique is allowing researchers to pinpoint ways of modifying drugs to avoid side effects.

Their work will deepen our understanding of matter in extreme conditions and fundamental particle physics.

Tais Gorkhover, Michael Kagan, Kazuhiro Terao and Joshua Turner will each receive $2.5 million for research that studies fundamental particles, nanoscale objects, quantum materials and machine learning.

The X-ray laser movie shows what happens when light hits retinal, a key part of vision in animals and photosynthesis in microbes. The action takes place in a trillionth of an eye blink.

The researchers observed how an enzyme from drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria damages an antibiotic molecule. The new technique provides a powerful tool to examine changes in biological molecules as they happen.

Water is more complicated than it seems. Now a study led by researchers at Stockholm University has probed the movements of its molecules on a timescale of millionths of a billionth of a second.

Experiments at SLAC heated water from room temperature to 100,000 degrees Celsius in less than a millionth of a millionth of a second, producing an exotic state of water that could shed light on Earth’s most important liquid.

By placing the tiniest strands of proteins on one-atom-thick graphene, scientists capture promising X-ray laser images of these elusive biomolecules that play a key role in neurodegenerative diseases.

The liquid sheets – less than 100 water molecules thick – will let researchers probe chemical, physical and biological processes, and even the nature of water itself, in a way they could never do before.

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