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SLAC builds and uses various kinds of lasers to do scientific research. 

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PULSE graduate student Jian Chen in a laser lab at SLAC.

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Revealing both sides of the story in a single experiment has been a grand scientific challenge.

nuclear and electronic
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Understanding nature’s process could inform the next generation of artificial photosynthetic systems that produce clean and renewable energy from sunlight and water.

How electrons flow in the oxygen-evolving complex of Photosystem II.
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Learning how liquid silicates behave at these extreme temperatures and pressures has been a longstanding challenge in the geosciences.

atomic arrangements of liquid silicates at the extreme conditions found in the core-mantle boundary.
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The advance opens a path toward a new generation of logic and memory devices that could be 10,000 times faster than today's.

Fanciful illustration based on electron orbitals
Animation

In photosystem II, the water-splitting center cycles through four stable states, S0-S3. On a baseball field, S0 would be...

Photosystem II
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Siegfried Glenzer's team and collaborators from Tel Aviv University are working on a method that could make proton accelerators 100 times smaller without giving...

Glenzer-LaserProtonAcceleration
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Light-driven reactions are at the heart of human vision, photosynthesis and solar power generation. Seeing the very first step opens the door to observing...

Illustration showing electron orbitals ballooning in response to light
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New research shows that when a bunch of electrons zooms through the middle of a ring-shaped laser beam, the bunch can wind up with...

donut laser
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This new technology could enable future insights into chemical and biological processes that occur in solution, such as vision, catalysis and photosynthesis.

UED liquid
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An LCLS imaging technique reveals how a mosquito-borne bacterium deploys a toxin to kill mosquito larvae. Scientists hope to harness it to fight disease.

A photograph of mosquito larvae.
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Hitting molecules with two photons of light at once set off unexpected processes that were captured in detail with SLAC’s X-ray laser. Scientists say...

Closeup image of molecular movie frames
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Just as engineers once compressed some of the power of room-sized mainframes into desktop PCs, so too have the researchers shown how to pack...

This image, magnified 25,000 times, shows a section of an accelerator-on-a-chip.