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December

December 17, 2009
    KIPAC Workshop Looks Back in Time to Understand the Universe
When astronomers look to the sky, they see millions upon millions of individual objects: the discernable stars and other sources of light that make up our universe. But they also see a faint, diffuse glow spread across the entire sky that can't be attributed to single sources. 

December 16, 2009
    An Advance in Superconducting Magnet Technology Opens the Door for More Powerful Colliders
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has just started producing collisions, but scientists and engineers have already made significant progress in preparing for future upgrades beyond the collider's nominal design performance, including a 10-fold increase in collision rates by the end of the next decade and, eventually, higher-energy beams. 

December 14, 2009
    XPP's Monster Arm
Last week the X-ray Pump Probe instrument, slated to become the third instrument at the Linac Coherent Light Source, reached a milestone in its installation phase with the addition of a robot arm. 

December 10, 2009
    SLAC Accelerator Expertise at Work in the LHC
CERN's Large Hadron Collider became the world's highest energy particle collider when it began colliding protons at 1.18 tera-electron volts late last month. With their combined 25 years of experience on just such a system, a SLAC team of researchers helped CERN solve an unanticipated complexity with LHC radio frequency system, helping get the giant machine up and running on schedule. 

December 9, 2009
    Fermi Telescope Sees Brightest Blazar Flare
A galaxy located billions of light-years away is commanding the attention of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and astronomers around the globe. Thanks to a series of flares that began September 15, the galaxy is now the brightest source in the gamma-ray sky—more than ten times brighter than it was in the summer. 

December 7, 2009
    CAMP-ing at LCLS
Instead of sleeping bags and s'mores fixings, roughly 20 scientists and technicians packed 40 containers weighing roughly 10 tons for CAMP. There are no fires, no roasting marshmallows and no tents. Instead, this CAMP is a brand new instrument for a series of three experiments that began November 24 at the Linac Coherent Light Source. 

December 3, 2009
    Springtime for the Linac: The West End Reawakens for FACET
Winter may be just around the corner, but the first two-thirds of SLAC's linear accelerator just woke up from a 20 month hibernation. 


November

November 30, 2009
    First Pump-Probe Experiment at LCLS Completed
The first experiment using the Linac Coherent Light Source to illuminate molecules via a "pump-probe" technique has been completed by an international team of more than 30 scientists from institutions including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LCLS and the joint SLAC/Stanford PULSE Institute. 

November 19, 2009
    Crashing the Size Barrier
Like surfers on monster waves, electrons can ride waves of plasma to very high energies in a very short distance. Scientists have proven that plasma acceleration works. Now they're developing it as a way to dramatically shrink the size and cost of particle accelerators for science, medicine, industry and myriad other uses. 

November 12, 2009
    New Research Helps Overcome Barrier for Organic Electronics
A multi-institutional research team has determined why some transistors made of organic crystals don't perform well, yielding ideas about how to make them work better. 

November 3, 2009
    Fermi Telescope Detects Gamma-Rays from "Star Factories" in Other Galaxies
Nearby galaxies undergoing a furious pace of star formation also emit lots of gamma rays, say astronomers using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Two so-called "starburst" galaxies, plus a satellite of our own Milky Way galaxy, represent a new category of gamma-ray-emitting objects detected both by Fermi and ground-based observatories.

November 3, 2009
    Fermi Telescope Finds More New Pulsars
Yesterday at the 2009 Fermi Symposium in Washington, D.C., postdoctoral researcher Lucas Guillemot of the Max Planck Institute reported that the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected eight more pulsars that had not been seen in other wavelengths of light, bringing the total of these gamma-ray-only objects to 24.

November 2, 2009
    High-Precision Measurements Confirm Cosmologists' Standard View of the Universe
A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team co-led by Sarah Church of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, and by Walter Gear, of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.


October

October 29, 2009
    Fermi Telescope Celebrates One Year of Science
Just over a year after the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope began taking science data, the collaboration is celebrating its many noteworthy results.

October 29, 2009
    Fermi Telescope Caps First Year With Glimpse of Space-Time
On May 10, 2009, the Fermi telescope and other satellites detected a so-called short gamma-ray burst, designated GRB 090510, from a galaxy 7.3 billion lightyears away. Of the many gamma-ray photons detected from the 2.1-second burst, two possessed energies differing by one million times. Yet after traveling some seven billion years, the pair arrived just nine-tenths of a second apart, reconfirming Einstein's theory of gravity.

October 27, 2009
    SIMES Physicists Demystify Electron Behavior in High-temperature Superconductors
Researchers at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science, a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford University, have found encouraging evidence to help explain the mysterious behavior of electrons in "unconventional" high-temperature superconductors.

October 19, 2009
    LCLS: The World's Largest Laser Writer?
While not the smallest lettering ever created, the tiny initials "LCLS" have been written with what may be the world's most potent pen. Etched into boron carbide, a super-hard substance used in accelerator shielding and body armor, the lettering has helped researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory explore the capabilities of the world's first hard X-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source.

October 15, 2009
    LCLS Users Test X-ray Laser's Effects on Atoms, Molecules Next
It's been a busy few weeks at the Linac Coherent Light Source. The Atomic, Molecular and Optical instrument's second user group, led by The Ohio State University physicist Louis DiMauro, wrapped up a five-day run early Tuesday morning, and the third group is set to start science today.

October 15, 2009
    Recovery Act Funds from Fermilab Boost SLAC Accelerator Tech Development
This month, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will receive a major financial boost to help drive the design and fabrication of components for a prototype next-generation accelerator being built at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. 

October 13, 2009
    Researchers Reconstruct Complete Protein Network
Researchers at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource have helped resolve the structures of 73 proteins involved in the metabolic processes of a heat-loving bacterium found in deep-sea thermal vents. Published in the September 18 issue of Science, the study is the most comprehensive of its kind ever completed. The results could help explain how metabolic networks evolve, and could help drive further research in both medicine and energy science.

October 8, 2009
    New Twist on Favorite X-ray Technique Promises Ultrafast Molecular Studies
A team of physicists from the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, including graduate student David Bernstein, have made a promising discovery that a well-known synchrotron technique is applicable to free-electron lasers.

October 5, 2009
    Crafting Coherence
With experimentalists just beginning to reveal the ultrafast secrets of atoms and molecules in motion with the Linac Coherent Light Source, researchers at SLAC are already working on the next generation of X-ray free electron laser.

October 1, 2009
    LCLS Launches User Science Today
SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source opened for business this morning, and the first user experiment is now underway.


September

September 29, 2009
    Researchers Achieve New Control of Useful Long-Wavelength Radiation
Physicists Aaron Lindenberg and Haidan Wen of the PULSE Institute for Ultrafast Energy Science have discovered a new mechanism for manipulating terahertz radiation fields, which are widely used in materials characterization, chemical sensing and noninvasive imaging.

September 23, 2009
    Fermi Telescope in Action: Capturing a Gamma-ray Burst
The gamma-ray burst detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on September 2 was a big one, and included the highest-energy gamma-ray so far measured from such a burst. This animation shows the Large Area Telescope's field of view (blue circle) swing over to center on the burst, visible as a bright flash of white near the beginning of the animation.

September 21, 2009
    FACET Passes Critical Decision 1 Review
On September 10, the FACET project received approval of Critical Decision 1, CD-1, from the Department of Energy, following a successful review in July.

September 18, 2009
    First Test of New X-ray Laser Strips Neon Bare
It takes a lot of energy to strip all ten electrons from an atom of neon. Doing it from the inside out, knocking away the most-closely-held, innermost electrons first, is an even rarer feat. But the brilliant X-ray pulses of the Linac Coherent Light Source have done just that, in the successful first test of the unprecedented X-ray laser with its first scientific instrument.

September 14, 2009
    Where the LCLS Ends: The SXR Beamline
Beginning next spring, researchers will begin to conduct experiments with the Linac Coherent Light Source's powerful bursts of X-ray light using the Soft X-Ray instrument, located on the second LCLS beamline to begin operation.

September 11, 2009
    Gamma-ray Burst Hits Highest Energy Yet
For the second time in as many years, a Large Area Telescope collaboration meeting was punctuated by a stellar firework. Last week's meeting, which ran from August 29 through September 4, was briefly interrupted on Wednesday when the LAT, the main instrument onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, recorded a large gamma-ray burst.

September 10, 2009
    Calming the Wakefield
For the International Linear Collider to run at maximum performance, each of its 27,000 cavities must be designed as precisely as possible. It is very time consuming and costly, however, to produce physical prototypes, so researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory decided to use a supercomputer to create and test virtual prototypes of the cavities.

September 8, 2009
    Silicon Detector Validated, Moves Forward
Two of the three detector design concepts for the proposed next linear collider have been validated by the International Detector Advisory Group, and their conclusions endorsed by the International Linear Collider Steering Committee.

September 1, 2009
    Where the LCLS Ends: The MEC Instrument
The sixth and final instrument currently planned for the Linac Coherent Light Source will investigate the extremes of the universe around us. The Matter in Extreme Conditions instrument, supported by DOE Office of Science Recovery Act funds, will allow researchers to create and probe matter at extreme temperatures, extreme pressures and extreme densities.


August

August 27, 2009
    Keeping Power Levels Smooth and Steady
Two months into what will be a year of intensive testing, researchers and engineers with SLAC's Power Conversion Engineering group are making strides in improving the stability of the Marx modulator.

August 24, 2009
    Vanquishing Infinity: Old Methods Lead to a New Approach to Finding a Quantum Theory of Gravity
Zvi Bern, John Carrasco, and Henrik Johanssen at UCLA, Lance Dixon at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Radu Roiban at Pennsylvania State University have found a way to carry out a new set of gravity calculations with the help of an older theory that has been known since the 1980s to be finite.

August 20, 2009
    Hydrogen-rich Material Promises Advances in Energy Transmission, Fuel Storage
Researchers at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science, a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford University, have produced a hydrogen-rich alloy that could provide insight into the properties of metallic hydrogen, according to a study published in the August 17 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

August 19, 2009
    LCLS AMO Instrument Sees First Light
Yesterday evening, the Linac Coherent Light Source X-ray beam streamed into the Atomic, Molecular and Optical Science instrument for the first time.

August 11, 2009
    SLAC Researchers Reveal the Dance of Water
Recent work at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and several universities in Sweden and Japan, however, is shedding new light on water’s molecular idiosyncrasies, offering insight into its strange bulk properties.

August 10, 2009
    First Black Holes Born Starving
The first black holes in the universe had dramatic effects on their surroundings despite the fact that they were small and grew very slowly, according to recent supercomputer simulations carried out by astrophysicists Marcelo Alvarez and Tom Abel of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, and John Wise, formerly of KIPAC and now of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.


July

July 24, 2009
    LCLS Team Installs Final Undulator
The Linac Coherent Lightsource put a punctuation mark on recent progress Wednesday, July 22, as staff from SLAC's Mechanical Fabrication Department installed the last of the 33 undulator magnets that will be used to drive the LCLS X-ray beamline.

July 22, 2009
    A New Path of Conduction for Future Electronics
Last month, researchers from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory made headlines when they revealed experimental evidence of a topological insulator: a material that could revolutionize computer processors by allowing electricity to flow without resistance. This week in Science, SLAC theorists along with an experimental group in Germany report additional detail about the way these topological insulators conduct electricity.

July 17, 2009
    Dark Matter May Be Brighter Than Expected
The Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope might be able to find dark matter in our galaxy, and soon, if new predictions prove true.

July 13, 2009
    Simulations Illuminate Universe's First Twin Stars
By creating robust simulations of the early universe, astrophysicists Matthew Turk and Tom Abel of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and Brian O'Shea of Michigan State University have gained the most detailed understanding to date of the formation of the first stars.

July 7, 2009
    BaBar's Hunt for an Exotic Higgs Boson
The BaBar collaboration has been searching for hypothetical light-mass Higgs bosons—the particles suspected of giving objects their mass. While the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will search for a heavy-mass Higgs that lies outside the BaBar experiment's energy range, other theories predict another, lighter Higgs within BaBar's reach.

July 6, 2009
    Fermi Telescope Probes New Gamma-only Pulsars
In two papers published in the July 2 edition of Science Express, researchers have reported a new class of pulsar and evidence that helps explain how gamma-ray emission occurs.

July 2, 2009
    FACET: Toward the Tabletop Accelerator
A new experimental facility aims to shrink the size—and costs—of future particle accelerators.


June

June 26, 2009
    Hats Off for Top Off
At 2:00 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, SSRL engineers and physicists achieved "top off injection," whereby they replenished the current within the SPEAR3 storage ring without blocking the X-ray beam headed for selected SSRL beamlines.

June 26, 2009
    BaBar Celebrates 400th Paper
A champagne toast in Valencia, Spain, on Monday marked a tremendous accomplishment for the BaBar collaboration: the group has submitted its 400th paper for publication.

June 22, 2009
    New Insight into Cataract Formation
Recent research conducted at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource has revealed a possible path to preventing age-related cataracts.

June 16, 2009
    New Modulator Prototype Put to the Test
Yesterday, a team of physicists and engineers from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory completed initial testing on a new power source, the Marx modulator, connected to its target device, and launched a yearlong test.

June 15, 2009
    Exotic Material Could Revolutionize Electronics
Move over, silicon—it may be time to give the Valley a new name. Physicists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips.

June 11, 2009
    Electric Sensation at the Final Focus Test Beam
Five SLAC scientists and their collaborators have started a new chapter in the field of electromagnetism with research that could change the way your computer stores data. Their results, which appear on the front cover of the May 29 issue of Physical Review Letters, demonstrate for the first time a way to change a magnet's polarity using an electric rather than magnetic field.

June 8, 2009
    SSRL to Aid New Energy-Research Center
The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at SLAC will play a key role in a new effort to make solar power more efficient and inexpensive.

June 4, 2009
    Researchers Reveal Structure of Key Genetic Proofreading Protein
A team of Stanford University researchers working in the lab of Nobel laureate Roger Kornberg recently used the high energy X-rays at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory to examine the proofreading function of a vital protein called RNA polymerase.

June 2, 2009
    Fermi Telescope's Gamma-ray Surprises
Back in June 1991, just before the launch of NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, astronomers knew of gamma rays from exactly one galaxy beyond our own. To their surprise and delight, the satellite captured similar emissions from dozens of other galaxies. Now its successor, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is filling in the picture with new finds of its own.

June 1, 2009
    Theorists Reveal Path to True Muonium
True muonium, a long-theorized but never-seen atom, might be observed in future experiments, thanks to recent theoretical work by researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Arizona State University.


May

May 28, 2009
    Simulating a More Efficient Linear Collider
Scientists around the world are working hard to hammer out a workable blueprint for the next big particle accelerator, the International Linear Collider, by 2012. A group at SLAC is doing its part, running supercomputer simulations to maximize the accelerator's performance and keep costs down on the proposed multi-billion-dollar collider.

May 26, 2009
    Where the LCLS Ends: The CXI Instrument
The Coherent X-ray Imaging instrument, the fourth scientific instrument to be installed at the Linac Coherent Light Source, will view single objects smaller than a micron, or one millionth of a meter—tiny. But even better than that, it may be the first X-ray instrument ever to do so for individual biological molecules when it comes online in 2011.

May 18, 2009
    SLAC to Join New Energy Frontier Research Efforts
The Department of Energy has funded 46 new projects that will investigate ways to make the U.S. energy economy greener and more secure. SLAC will contribute substantially to at least three of these Energy Frontier Research Centers.

May 12, 2009
    New Study Predicts Material for Super-efficient Transistors
In a paper published online Sunday in Nature Physics, SIMES researchers Xiao-Liang Qi and Shou-Cheng Zhang, with colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University in Beijing, predict that a room temperature material will exhibit the quantum spin Hall effect.

May 11, 2009
    High-pressure Compound Could Be Key to Hydrogen-powered Vehicles
Hydrogen-powered cars sound like a great idea, but how do you stuff enough hydrogen into a small, portable volume to make it practical as fuel? Help could be on the way in the form of a hydrogen-rich compound discovered by researchers in the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

May 5, 2009
    ILC Update: Detector and Accelerator Reviews
More than 200 scientists gathered in Tsukuba, Japan, last month for TILC09, a joint physics and detector workshop and design meeting for the proposed International Linear Collider. Nearly 10 percent of attendees had SLAC name badges.

May 7, 2009
    FGST: Gamma-ray Bursts May Last Longer than Previously Thought
Gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, are thought to last mere seconds or a few short minutes. But new data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope show at least some of them have much more staying power.

May 4, 2009
    High-energy Electrons Could Come from Pulsars—or Dark Matter
Something in our galactic neighborhood seems to be producing large numbers of high-energy electrons, according to new data gathered by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The electrons could be coming from nearby pulsars—or they could be a longed-for signal of dark matter, the elusive, invisible material thought to make up nearly a quarter of the universe.


April

April 30, 2009
    Gamma Signature, Astronomer's Telegram Cast Light on Dazzling Blazar
When it comes to watching the skies, two sets of eyes are always better than one, especially if one pair can see, say, radio waves, while the other has X-ray or even gamma-ray vision.

April 27, 2009
    Where the LCLS Ends: The XCS Instrument
The Linac Coherent Light Source will pack a wallop. When it begins operation later this year, the LCLS will provide 10 trillion X-ray photons in a flash of about 100 femtoseconds—a quadrillion times faster than accomplished by today's best storage-ring-based synchrotron lightsources.

April 21, 2009
    LCLS: The World's First Hard X-ray Laser Achieves "First Light"
The world's brightest X-ray source sprang to life last week at the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The Linac Coherent Light Source offers researchers the first-ever glimpse of high-energy or "hard" X-ray laser light produced in a laboratory.

April 20, 2009
    SiD Reaches Design Milestone
This week, scientists from around the world are gathering in Tsukuba, Japan, for a major linear collider meeting called TILC09. There, three detector design concepts for the next linear collider will take center stage.

April 17, 2009
    SSRL Beamline 14 Sees First Light
Last week, X-ray light for the first time streamed into the new Beamline 14-1 hutch at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource.

April 16, 2009
    Protein Discovery Opens Door to Better Antibiotics
Bacterial and viral drug resistance in several disabling diseases might be better handled in the future, thanks in part to recent research at SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource.

April 9, 2009
    Coke Bottle Quantum Physics
Don't be fooled by the collection of empty coke bottles in James Cryan's office. The PULSE Institute for Ultrafast Energy Science graduate student isn't a caffeine fiend—the coke bottles are for science.

April 7, 2009
    Scientists Identify Achilles' Heel of Flu Viruses
Scientists have recently identified a family of human antibodies that defend against an unprecedented number of flu virus types, including seasonal flu as well as the deadly H5N1 "bird flu" and 1918 H1N1 "Spanish flu," which killed millions during World War I.

April 6, 2009
    Newly Revamped SSRL Beamlines 4-1 and 4-3 Bringing Smiles to Users
Two completely rebuilt beamlines at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource hosted their first experiments in March. Beamlines 4-1 and 4-3 are both X-ray absorption spectroscopy, or XAS, stations that cover the range of the X-ray energy spectrum most commonly used with this technique, between 2 and 35 keV.

April 2, 2009
    Molecular Alignment Gives Monolayers the Edge in Bendable Semiconductor
A team of researchers at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource has recently shed new light on how organic semiconductors function as transistors.


March

March 31, 2009
    A Flight Simulator for the World's Smallest Beam
Commissioning has begun at the Japan-based Accelerator Test Facility 2, a major technology test bed for future accelerators, including the proposed International Linear Collider, or ILC. During the two-year commissioning process, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory physicists are shuttling back and forth to KEK, the high-energy accelerator lab in Tsukuba, to join an international team of scientists working around the clock to get the accelerator's final focus system up and running.

March 19, 2009
    Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Namibia's HESS Explore a Blazar
An international team of astrophysicists using telescopes on the ground and in space, including the Large Area Telescope aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, has uncovered surprising changes in radiation emitted by an active galaxy.

March 19, 2009
    BaBar Confirms Bottom-most Bottomonium
New results from the BaBar experiment confirm the collaboration's detection of the bottomonium ground state particle, the ηb (pronounced eta-sub-bee).

March 12, 2009
    W Bozon Squeezes Higgs Particle
The DZero collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermilab has achieved the world's most precise measurement of the mass of the W boson by a single experiment.

March 11, 2009
    Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Reveals Sky Map and Top-ten Source List
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a joint mission of NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and international partners, today released a three-month sky-map of the gamma-ray sky and a list of the ten most interesting gamma-ray sources they have observed.

March 5, 2009
    An Elegant Approximation
SLAC theoretical physicist Stan Brodsky and University of Costa Rica physicist Guy de Téramond have found a simple equation describing the behavior of the subatomic particles within the proton.


February

February 26, 2009
    Data Mining Meets Black Magic
Using the advanced mathematics of particle physics, SLAC theorist Marvin Weinstein and Tel Aviv University theorist David Horn have created a completely new method by which large data sets can be mined for structure and specific information.

February 19, 2009
    A Gamma Source Close to Home
In a colloquium talk last week at the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto, FGST Large Area Telescope principal investigator Peter Michelson reported a gamma source close enough to Earth that it moved visibly across the telescope's field of view in just hours, against a still backdrop of stars.

February 19, 2009
    Key to Origin of the Universe Could Be in Neutrinos and Project X
Last Friday, Fermilab's Borris Kayser and fellow physicists Craig Dukes of the University of Virginia and Gregory Dubois-Felsmann of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory told a crowd at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago about the newest research front in particle physics—the intensity frontier—and the newest tool to reach it—Project X, a proposed proton accelerator.

February 12, 2009
    The LHC and the Hunt for Hidden Dimensions
In a talk at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute last Wednesday, SLAC physicist JoAnne Hewett explained how the Large Hadron Collider can solve a puzzle that has vexed physicists for more than a century: the proposed existence of extra dimensions.

February 3, 2009
    First Undulator Test Lights Up the LCLS
The Linac Coherent Light Source reached another milestone last Wednesday evening, when a beam of electrons wiggled its way through a row of magnets and produced the instrument's first X-rays.


January

January 29, 2009
    Quantum Hologram Sets New Size Record for Writing
Physicists have set a new world record for the smallest writing, with features of letters as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a meter.

January 22, 2009
    Close Up: Accelerating SSRL
Most SSRL users are focused on the facility's X-rays, which they use to illuminate samples ranging from fossils to proteins. But it's the SPEAR3 storage ring that accelerates electrons to produce those X-rays, and it's the Accelerator Systems Department that oversees the function and maintenance of the ring.

January 15, 2009
    EXO: How Clean Is Clean?
Even in a field where cleanliness means far more than just washing your hands, the Enriched Xenon Observatory 200 experiment, or EXO 200, is pushing the boundaries of "clean." To ensure that EXO 200 proceeds without interruption, its scientists and engineers must scour the entire experiment for even parts-per-trillion of foreign substances.

January 7, 2009
    Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Discovers Slew of New Pulsars
Four months into its mission, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered 12 never-before-seen pulsars and observed gamma-ray pulses from 18 others, shedding new insight on the high-energy universe.

Office of Science/U.S. DOE