SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory reposted this
With the fast “shutter speed” of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's light source, our physicists created the first-ever movies elucidating local atomic movement 🎥⚛️, like that which occurs when #quantum materials transition between a metal and an insulator. Columbia Engineering
Skyline College’s Kolo Wamba and Southern University’s Fred Lacy spent their summers working with SLAC scientists on the hunt for neutrinos. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Visiting Faculty Program helps connect faculty like them coming from institutions historically underrepresented in research to DOE scientists around the country. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gXY6m2bV
Make some Illinoise 🎶 We’ll be at #WE24 in Chicago, IL next week. Look for SLAC at booth 429! #SWE #WomeninSTEM #TogetherWeRise https://bit.ly/3YhTZlE
#OTD 35 years ago, a 6.9 earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area. The Loma Prieta quake was the strongest in the region since 1906. The impact is still remembered today by the people and institutions that dealt with its aftermath. Despite being located one kilometer from the San Andreas Fault, the world’s longest linear accelerator at the time was only left with a bit of a tilt. The quake displaced several portions of the accelerator systems, but using lenses and a laser beam inserted at one end of the 3.2-km accelerator, engineers could adjust and align the sections back into place with sub-millimeter precision. Learn more about earthquakes impacts on our accelerator: https://bit.ly/4h7O37g
Emulating an electron beam in our X-ray laser 🐍 This slithery sector 0 visitor was photographed by SLAC scientist Eric Cunningham just in time for #WildlifeWednesday. Sector 0 is where an optical laser kicks electrons out of a photocathode, producing an electron beam inside our new superconducting accelerator. That beam later gets wiggled inside magnets to produce X-rays. Even the most powerful X-rays in the world need a little wiggle to make rattling discoveries!
Studying history, and making it 🏆 Congratulations to physicist and historian of physics Michael Riordan for winning the American Physical Society 2025 Abraham Pais Prize for the History of Physics. The award recognizes Riordan’s "important contributions to the history of post-World II physics, including the discovery of quarks, the invention and development of the transistor, and the search for the Higgs boson; and for making these stories interesting and accessible to both non-academic and academic readers." https://lnkd.in/gVSrijV8
These are our users: Scientists from around the world who conduct research at SLAC’s light sources shine light on the latest discoveries and innovations in talks, workshops and discussions. Learn more about our recent users' meeting: https://lnkd.in/gyzQ9a_Y
Congratulations to Kelly Gaffney, professor of photon science at SLAC and Stanford University, for being named among the 2024 fellows of the American Physical Society! Fellowship recognizes members for their outstanding efforts to advance physics, and Gaffney is selected for “seminal contributions to the development of novel ultrafast X-ray methods and their application to solution phase chemical and molecular dynamics.” Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gX4SYhfa
Even before completion, the SLAC-built LSST Camera is already winning photography awards. The world’s largest digital camera will soon be mounted on the Rubin Observatory in Chile. Before it traveled to South America, a CNRS team built a filter exchange system for the camera and came to SLAC to test it. This photo captured the team reflecting in the filters themselves, and was recently recognized with one of the top prizes in the 2024 CNRS Physics of the Universe photo competition. #CapturingTheCosmos
50 years ago, the discovery of the J/psi particle launched the modern era of particle physics. On November 11, 1974, teams working with two of the world’s most powerful accelerators at Brookhaven National Laboratory and SLAC announced that they had independently discovered the same elementary particle. Burton Richter and colleagues from SLAC and Berkeley Lab made their discovery of a new particle they called “psi” by colliding electrons and their antimatter opposites in SLAC’s SPEAR ring collider. Samuel Ting’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology team had found the particle by smashing protons into a beryllium target at Brookhaven National Laboratory. They named it “J”. Two years later Richter and Ting shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the J/psi particle. Their findings proved that the theory of quarks as fundamental building blocks of matter was correct, sparking a “November revolution” launching rapid progress in our understanding of the basic laws of nature. We’re hosting a one-day symposium to revisit the history leading up to this discovery, the observations from both labs, and the continuing influence of their findings. Join us virtually on #NationalSTEMDay Nov.8: https://bit.ly/3ZZzJY7
Want to learn about an ancient pathway and the modern tools at SLAC that are helping to illuminate this chemical messenger from the dawn of life? Tune into tonight’s #SLACPublicLecture to find out more from Macon Abernathy, and stick around after for a live Q&A: stanford.io/4gZZMo8
