You might flee from words like “quarks,” “relativity,” and “joule,” but you shouldn’t have to, and neither should a kid. A new children’s book from the folks at a few of our national labs will hopefully make the things particle physicists are talking about easier to digest.
The poor water droplets never stood a chance. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab have aimed their insanely powerful X-ray laser at these tiny spheres of H20, and in the process created these stunning videos.
SLAC’s National Accelerator Laboratory is already home to the world’s brightest X-ray laser—but it’s getting an upgrade. The $1 billion project will see the device become 10,000 times brighter and 8,000 times faster.
Scientists at SLAC decided it was time to upgrade some of their kit, and the result is the laboratory’s most powerful laser system ever. The device will create temperatures up to millions of degrees and pressures approaching 2 trillion pounds per square inch.
If you know anything about the Large Hadron Collider, you know that it is huge. Massive. 17 miles of tunnels under Switzerland. Traditional accelerators need all that space to get particles to smash into each other at close to the speed of light. But scientists at Stanford have come one step closer to a new type…
Stanford's Linear Accelerator Laboratory operates the longest particle accelerator of its kind—it's produced groundbreaking work in particle physics over the decades, as well as several Nobel prizes. But surprisingly, it also played a major role in the early web: By hosting the first web site in the US. It wasn't much…
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is one of those places that makes magic. Originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, this facility is where many modern discoveries about how matter works were made. Six researchers have earned Nobel prizes for their work at SLAC. It's also where the first website…
Just getting a particle up to near the speed of light isn't good enough for today's physics. To properly unravel the fundamentals of the universe, particles have to be smashed together with enormous force. And two Stanford researchers have just devised a laser-based method that imparts ten times the power of…
Conventional data transmission techniques rely on two-dimensional signals to carry the information down a pipeline, but there's only so much potential bandwidth to go around. There are only so many signals you can pack into a given plane before they begin to overlap and interfere with another. But if we were to add an…
The 21st century has been a real disappointment so far. Our robot servants top out at mediocre vaccums, self-driving cars are years away (and won't be able to fly even when they do arrive), and we're closer to inventing tricorders than phasers. A tricorder. Who wants a goddamn medical scanner when you could be…
Thirty feet beneath the hills of Menlo Park, scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator have worked for the past half century to alter our fundamental understanding of the universe. The 1.9-mile-long structure, where electrons fly at nearly the speed of light, is reputed to be the straightest object on earth.…
You're looking at the heart of the most powerful X-Ray laser machine ever created by humans, billions of times stronger than anything before it. It's the Linac Coherent Light Source and it has made something that nobody has made before in this planet: the kind of matter that you can only find in the heart of stars and…
This newly created X-ray laser is just unimaginably powerful. It's a billion times brighter than any previous X-ray source, and it can probe hot dense matter at nearly four million degrees. This laser could unlock the secrets of the Sun.
So just how much can a digital camera the size of a Hyundai see? Hopefully, if you're the Stanford team building it, enough to answer some fundamental questions about our galaxy.
