SLAC Timeline
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1962
Contract execution and start of accelerator construction
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1966
Construction completed and research begins
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1967
20-GeV electron beam achieved
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1968
First evidence discovered for quarks
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1972
SPEAR operations begin
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1973
Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Project (SSRP) started
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1974
Discovery of psi particle
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1976
Discovery of charm quark and tau lepton
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1976
Nobel Prize shared by SLAC's Burton Richter for the J/psi discovery
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1977
SSRP becomes Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL)
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1980
PEP operations begin
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1982
Wolf Prize awarded to SLAC's Martin Perl for discovery of the tau lepton
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1989
SLC operations begin; 50 GeV electron and positron beams achieved
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1990
Nobel Prize shared by SLAC's Richard Taylor for first evidence that nucleons consist of quarks
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1990
SPEAR becomes a dedicated synchrotron radiation facility with its own independent injector
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1992
SSRL becomes a division of SLAC
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1993
Final Focus Test Beam facility constructed
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1994
Initiation of the PEP-II project to build the Asymmetric B Factory
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1995
Nobel Prize in Physics shared by Martin Perl for the discovery of the tau lepton.
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1996
NLCTA project initiated
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1997
First beam injected into B Factory
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1998
First B Factory particle collision occurs
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1999
First events recorded by B Factory's BaBar detector
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2000
Joint NASA-Stanford GLAST project initiated, Helen Quinn shares Dirac Medal
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2002
SLAC celebrates 40th anniversary, LCLS project approved
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2003
Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology established
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2006
Roger Kornberg awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry for RNA polymerase work done partly at SSRL
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2008
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope begins mapping the sky; SLAC built and operates the main instrument for the international project
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2009
Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) sees first light
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2011
First beam delivered to the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET)
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2012
SLAC’s ATLAS technology contributes to Higgs boson discovery at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider
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2012
SLAC celebrates 50th anniversary
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2015
Construction begins at Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) site in Chile (now known as Vera C. Rubin Observatory)
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2016
Responding to a call to build a revolutionary new X-ray laser, SLAC begins construction on LCLS-II