well slack used to be the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center it is now it's
a National Lab in the Department of
Energy family of National Labs this one
focuses predominantly on accelerator
linear accelerator technology we also
have multiple research efforts going on
at the lab slack is bigger than most
people realize so we have about 1,400
people working on staff now we have 140
buildings the accelerator is two miles
long and it is the longest linear single
building on earth the thing that you're
looking at when you're when you look at
the klystron gallery this is a mock-up
of what's actually going on underground
from where you'd be standing right here
up above the accelerator that's actually
10 meters underground so 30 feet below
the surface and so the copper tubes
actually the inside of those copper
tubes look like a little bit of a like a
tuna can almost and then there's a hole
down the middle and that's where the
electrons get accelerated and so if you
walk into this room you'll see these big
orange container big cylinders orange
cylinders those are the source of
radiofrequency energy which is pumping
this long stretch of stacked-up tuna
cans from either end and creates a
standing wave of radiofrequency electric
field and so when you walk into this
klystron gallery and you look up and you
look down and you cannot see the end it
is really heartwarming to know that
humans back in 1962 were able to build
this thing that was so perfectly
straight over such an incredible
distance
[Music]
the sxr hatch here is they typically
study condensed commencement
and so they're looking at novel
materials used for computing industry
storage magnetic materials
this is a mo we study the spectroscopy
of molecules and then what we're after
is how does the structure of a molecule
impact how fast it reacts for
photosynthesis whatever we may be
interested in this room is called it the
accelerator control room its new
location they have it sort of almost
like a fishbowl where there's a big
glass window where if you're in this
building you can look through the glass
window and watch the operators we're
running the accelerator looking at
screens and figuring out what's going on
is essentially what they're always
trying to do because the machine is
always operating in a condition where
it's a little bit broken and it never
really is working absolutely perfectly
so largely when they're in there looking
at the computer screens they're looking
at all of these measurements that happen
about the electrons on their way to
making x-rays in the future the part of
the construction that they're building
is called LCLs - and it's this upgrade
that will turn on sometime in 2020 late
2020 we'll start using it where instead
of firing 120 times per second they have
a new version of the accelerator that is
superconducting instead of having 120
photographs per second we're going to
get a million photographs per second so
I think what's actually most interesting
about this is not just that we're going
to record the same data but a you know
10 10 thousand times faster it's that
we're actually going to think about how
we perform experiments differently
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