SLAC History & Lore
SLAC and Stanford’s James D. Bjorken Receives 2015 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize
SLAC and Stanford's James D. Bjorken Shares 2015 Wolf Prize in Physics
Symmetry: The November Revolution
SLAC’s Earliest Websites Reappear in ‘Stanford Wayback’
Photo Exhibit Highlights SLAC History
SPEAR-heading X-ray Science for 40 Years
Last Saturday marked the 40th 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.