SLAC’s strong scientific and technical workforce excels at using its unique combination of ground- and space-based experiments to explore the frontiers of particle physics and cosmology. The primary science drivers are identification of the new physics of dark matter, testing the nature of dark energy in detail, probing the physics of the highest energy scales that governed the early universe, exploring the mass hierarchy for neutrinos, and the search for charge-parity violation.

The laboratory led the design, development, construction and operation of the state-of-the-art Large Area Telescope, which launched in June 2008 on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a major space observatory that is revolutionizing the understanding of high-energy processes in the universe. SLAC is also the lead DOE laboratory for constructing the 3.2 gigapixel camera for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will probe the properties of dark energy with high precision, enabling a better understanding of this dominant component of the universe.

SLAC also plays an important role in upgrades to the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) detector at the Large Hadron Collider; plans for the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) and the LUX-ZEPLIN experiments, which seek direct detection of relic dark matter; development of next-generation experiments for precision cosmology with studies of the cosmic microwave background; and plans for the future national neutrino program with the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

The theoretical physics group also plays an important role at SLAC, with research ranging from fundamental theoretical questions to detailed calculations and tests of theory relevant to particular experiments at SLAC and elsewhere.

In addition, since its inception in 2002, the joint SLAC-Stanford Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) has become a world-leading center for particle astrophysics and cosmology. The particle physics theory effort pursues a broad spectrum of forefront theoretical research across all areas of fundamental physics, from inflationary cosmology to Computational Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) to string theory.