SLAC History & Lore

SLAC and Stanford’s James D. Bjorken Receives 2015 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize

The European Physical Society honors Bjorken’s theoretical work on the parton structure of the proton, which contributed to the development of a theory of the strong nuclear force.

SLAC and Stanford's James D. Bjorken Shares 2015 Wolf Prize in Physics

Honored for early theoretical predictions that helped elucidate the nature of the strong force and the structure of the proton, he is still shaking things up today.

Symmetry: The November Revolution

Forty years ago, two different research groups announced the discovery of the same new particle and redefined how physicists view the universe.

SLAC’s Earliest Websites Reappear in ‘Stanford Wayback’

The Stanford University Libraries have launched the “Wayback” system – a Web archive that features SLAC’s earliest websites dating back to 1991.

Photo Exhibit Highlights SLAC History

As part of the opening of the new Research Support Building, SLAC's Archives and History Office is currently displaying a photo exhibition called "SLAC Perspectives: Then and Now." These photos, taken from the new exhibit, give a glimpse of SLAC's construction and early years.

SPEAR-heading X-ray Science for 40 Years

Last Saturday marked the 40^th anniversary of an historic event: In 1973, a team of research pioneers extracted hard X-rays for the first time from SLAC's SPEAR accelerator. Like X-rays from an X-ray tube, the radiation generated by SPEAR can deeply penetrate a large variety of materials and probe their inner structures. However, SPEAR's X-rays are significantly more intense and unlock the possibility for brand new science.

Obama Honors Sidney Drell with National Medal of Science

SLAC Deputy Director Emeritus and Stanford University Hoover Senior Fellow Sidney Drell was one of 12 distinguished researchers presented with the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama in a Feb. 1 ceremony at the White House.

Shedding Light

In 1971, physicist Burton Richter of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was building a new type of particle collider called a storage ring. The lab’s two-mile-long linear accelerator—housed in what was then the longest building in the world—would shoot electrons and their antimatter twins, called positrons, into the 80-meter-diameter Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring, and SPEAR would set the beams of particles on a collision course. Richter and his colleagues stood by to examine the debris to see what discoveries came out.