From the Director:
Remarks on the Dedication of LCLS
by Persis Drell
On Friday, April 10, 2009 at 10 p.m. the phone rang. I was sound asleep (lab directors go to bed early on Friday night) and as I struggled to open my eyes, the voice on the other end said "We have a laser!" And with that, the LCLS era at SLAC had begun.
The seeds for that late-night, jubilant announcement had been planted many years earlier. It began with a very smart accelerator physicist, Claudio Pellegrini, with a very good idea and a vision. That vision, helped, fostered and developed by Herman Winick and accelerator physicists at SLAC and elsewhere, was to use the SLAC linac to make the world's first X-ray FEL. Claudio and Herman organized workshops. With the help of Max Cornacchia, working groups were formed and the first design report was written. SSRL directors Bienenstock and Hodgson along with lab directors Richter and Dorfan gave their support. Working with the Department of Energy and the X-ray community, the Linac Coherent Light Source project came into being.
Read more...
Annual Accelerator Safety Workshop Examines Regulations
by Lauren Rugani
This week SLAC hosted the annual Department of Energy Accelerator Safety Workshop, where representatives from DOE laboratories across the country gathered to discuss how safety systems are applied
effectively throughout accelerator facilities.
This year's conference focused on revising the Accelerator Safety Order, a document that
regulates safety at accelerator facilities. Over two and a half days, attendees participated in panel discussions and breakout sessions, where they considered specific safety topics such as a metals moratorium, software quality assurance, access control and "lessons learned."
"All of the sessions had healthy and spirited discussions, with useful input from the attendees," said SLAC Director of LCLS Accelerator Systems David Schultz, who called the workshop a "tremendous success." The team responsible for updating the Accelerator Safety Order will present the comments from the workshop to the DOE by the end of the year,
for consideration in the next update to the Accelerator Safety Order in spring
2011.
Pakistan Flooding Relief
Bake Sale Next Monday
by Ziba Mahdavi
Next Monday, August 23, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on the Kavli Auditorium
patio, you can buy a homemade treat and contribute to relief for the victims of
the
flooding in Pakistan. Check or cash donations are also welcome, and tax deductible. The proceeds from the bake sale and your donations will be given to the International American Red Cross Pakistan Relief Funds.
Please contact Ziba Mahdavi (x2846) if you would like to help or have questions.
Successful telescope builders at the 2008 Kids' Day
optics workshop. (Photo by Ruth McDunn.)
Word of the Week: Galilean Telescope
by Lori Ann White
Just over 400 years ago, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei looked up at the sky through a small telescope of his own devising. He viewed the mountains and craters of the Moon, saw the planet Venus displaying phases like our
moon, and discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter, now often called the Galilean Moons in his honor.
Galileo's telescope used only two lenses: a concave objective and a convex eyepiece. That first telescope produced upright images, magnified about 20 times, though he later improved that to 30 times. Lower quality glass, relatively primitive techniques for grinding and finishing lenses and problems with the design resulted in blurry, distorted images—but nonetheless the first close look at these wonders in the night sky.
And the Galilean telescope is, quite literally, easy enough for a kid to build. Some kids will be doing just that today at the
SLAC Kids' Day optics workshop. By tonight, they'll be able to use their telescopes to see just what Galileo did. (If they're allowed to stay up late enough to catch Jupiter, that is.)
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