News archive

Browse the full collection of SLAC press releases and news features and stay up to date on the latest scientific advancements at the laboratory.

After almost two decades of synchrotron experiments, Caltech scientists have captured a clear picture of a cell’s nuclear pores, which are the doors and windows through which critical material in your body flows in and out of the cell’s nucleus...

The nuclear pore and its components.

SLAC researchers contributed to the design, construction, testing and analysis of the experiment, which has already put the tightest bounds yet on a popular theory of dark matter.

Bubble-like glass lenses inside a white cylindrical apparatus.

July 4 marks the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Higgs Boson!

Gustavo Cezar wears two colorful hats as an engineer with SLAC’s GISMo lab.

SLAC engineer Gustavo Cezar stands at a dairy farm in Central California.

Toro and Schuster are being recognized for their contributions to the design of experiments that use particle accelerators to search for dark matter particles.

SLAC physicists Natalia Toro and Philip Schuster

Knowing a magnet’s past will allow scientists to customize particle beams more precisely in the future. As accelerators stretch for higher levels of performance, understanding subtle effects, such as those introduced by magnetic history, is becoming more critical.

A magnet on a test stand inside SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Edelen draws on machine learning to fine tune particle accelerators, while Kurinsky develops dark matter detectors informed by quantum information science.

Side by side photographs of a woman and a man.

The Small Business Innovation Research Program brings government and private industry together to develop next-generation X-ray optics for LCLS-II.

A narrow two-mile long building stretches through trees and foothills.
SLAC Science Explained

XFELs: Spying on atoms and molecules

Molecular movie-making is both an art and a science; the results let us watch how nature works on the smallest scales.

Molecular movie filmstrip.

The X-rays they produce reveal the secrets of everything from ancient texts to modern pharmaceuticals.

 A synchrotron is a type of particle accelerator that produces intense beams of light.