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.

News Feature · VIA Symmetry Magazine

The Art of Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations

Students estimate their way through pop culture problems to learn a life skill.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have made the first structural observations of liquid water at temperatures down to minus 51 degrees Fahrenheit, within an elusive “no man’s land” where water’s strange properties are super-amplified.

Artist's concept - see caption

A sense of adventure and intellectual rigor led PULSE chemistry professor Kelly Gaffney to a successful career in science.

Image - PULSE chemistry professor Kelly Gaffney. (Brad Plummer/SLAC)

Even in their infancy, X-ray lasers such as SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source are notching a list of important discoveries, and a special issue of a scientific journal highlights their unique contributions to biological sciences.

Image - This illustration represents data derived from 175,000 X-ray diffraction patterns of Trapanosoma brucei cathepsin B, a protein relevant to African sleeping sickness, measured with X-ray pulses at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source. (CFEL)

A sensor design first envisioned in 1995 by physicists and engineers at SLAC plays a starring role in a major ATLAS detector upgrade at the Large Hadron Collider.

Photo - Several 3-D sensors etched into a silicon wafer

SLAC scientists have found a new way to produce bright pulses of light from accelerated electrons that could shrink "light source" technology used around the world since the 1970s to examine details of atoms and chemical reactions.

A PhD student inspects the microwave undulator.

If it exists, a type of decay called neutrinoless double-beta decay will show that neutrinos are their own antiparticles and can help scientists determine their masses.

Photo – SLAC engineers weld the xenon vessel shut

Differences between two types of black-hole-powered galaxies may reflect a change in how the galaxies extract energy from their central black holes.

News Feature · VIA Symmetry Magazine

Beam On: My Father’s Fight with Cancer

After working with particle accelerators his entire professional career, Heather Rock Woods’ father placed himself in the path of a beam to fight cancer.

Understanding the origins of our solar system, the future of our planet or humanity requires complex calculations run on high-power computers.

Photo - tom abel in srcc

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