X-ray light sources and electron imaging

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.

Former Stanford and UC-Berkeley physicist is honored for foundational research that peers into unconventional phenomena within exotic materials.

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

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.

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.

Like turning a snowball back into fluffy snow, a new technique turns high-density materials into a lower-density one by applying the chemical equivalent of ‘negative pressure.’

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 foils, each made from a single chemical element, are used to calibrate X-ray equipment at SLAC’s SSRL synchrotron, and were donated by long-time user, Farrel Lytle.

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