Sean Brennan's decades of X-ray expertise keep pulling him back to SLAC even though he formally retired in 2008. During a recent visit to the lab, he accepted the Farrel W. Lytle Award for his extensive contributions to SLAC's Stanford...

Scientists used the powerful X-ray laser at the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to create movies detailing trillionths-of-a-second changes in the arrangement of copper atoms after an extreme shock.

Working with a metal oxide that shows promise for future generations of electronic devices, IBM and SLAC scientists have shown they can precisely control the temperature at which it flips from being an electrical conductor to an insulator – and...

SLAC particle theorist Lance Dixon has been named co-winner of the 2014 J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, awarded each year by the American Physical Society.

The Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to theorists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert to recognize their work developing the theory of what is now known as the Higgs field. U.S. scientists played a significant role in advancing their...

In a detailed study of how intense light strips electrons from atoms, researchers used an X-ray laser, SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), to measure and sort the ejected electrons and discover how this process takes place.

If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he would likely extend his often-quoted list of life's certainties – death and taxes – to include more and more data. SLAC computer scientist Jacek Becla couldn't agree more. As founder of the Extremely...

In an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice.

Researchers hope to hijack a natural process called RNA interference to block the production of proteins linked to disease and treat medical conditions for which conventional drugs do not work, including cancer, heart disease, HIV and Parkinson’s disease.

Dao Xiang, a SLAC accelerator physicist, has received an international award for his work on a technique for tuning an electron beam with a laser to produce X-ray pulses with more uniform and predictable properties.

A special issue of a physics publication highlights the contributions of SLAC's X-ray laser and the few similar lasers around the globe in probing the interaction of light and matter at the scale of atoms and electrons.