From Science Magazine: “Tiny diamond mirrors could smooth out already revolutionary x-ray lasers”

From Science Magazine

27 Aug 2021
Adrian Cho

Ambitious recycling scheme would make giant accelerator-driven machines work more like ordinary lasers.

Magnets called undulators stretch roughly 100 meters down a tunnel at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with one side (right) producing hard x-rays and the other soft x-rays.Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Twelve years ago, physicists turned on the first x-ray laser, and since then it and several others around the world have proved themselves revolutionary probes of materials and molecules. But the devices, called x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), are only partially laserlike. In contrast to the pure, single-wavelength light emitted by conventional lasers, they produce noisy, chaotic beams. Now, physicists are developing a scheme that would enlist perfect diamond mirrors to make the x-ray pulses much more like ordinary laser beams and even more useful.

With two facilities now racing to stage proof-of-principle experiments as early as 2023, would-be users are taking notice. “I’m excited about the potential of this,” says Serena DeBeer, a chemist at the MGP Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion [MPG Institut für chemische Energieumwandlung (DE), who says the beams could be used to study the inner workings of enzymes as they catalyze reactions. But realizing such sophisticated XFELs may take 10 years and won’t be easy, warns Harald Sinn, an x-ray physicist at the European XFEL: “There are nightmares ahead.”

A conventional laser consists of a light-emitting material sitting between two mirrors. The carefully spaced mirrors form a cavity that resonates with light of the desired wavelength, just as an organ pipe rings with sound of a specific pitch. As the light passes back and forth through the material, it stimulates the stuff to produce more photons of the same wavelength, amplifying the light until a wave of identical photons marching in quantum mechanical lockstep—a laser beam—shines through one mirror, which is purposefully made imperfectly reflective.

This scheme won’t work for x-rays. Physicists lack both an obvious radiating material and, until recently, mirrors that will reflect x-rays at large enough angles to form a resonating cavity. So they use a particle accelerator to fire a bunch of electrons down a vacuum pipe and through long trains of magnets called undulators, which shake the electrons side to side so they radiate x-ray photons. The light then travels along with the electrons and pushes them into microbunches, which wiggle in unison and radiate far more strongly, producing a burst of x-rays just femtoseconds long.

The first free-electrion laser flicked on in the 1970s, producing much longer wavelength microwaves. It was not until 2009 that physicists at DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) achieved the feat for “hard” x-rays, when they used the lab’s 3-kilometer-long linear accelerator to fire up the world’s first XFEL, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS).

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory campus with world’s first x-ray laser- the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) unveiled in 2009.

SLAC LCLS

Other countries have since built a half-dozen XFELS.

As with ordinary laser beams, x-rays from an XFEL arrive in smooth fronts, like ocean waves across a beach. A single XFEL pulse can scatter off a nanometer-size crystal and reveal its atomic structure, even as it blows the crystal to bits. Biologists have used XFELs to determine the structures of myriad proteins and other molecules that won’t form crystals big enough to be studied at less intense x-ray sources. But because an XFEL uses fluctuations in the density of the electron beam to begin to generate x-rays, one pulse varies from another in intensity, and each pulse has a wide and randomly distributed spectrum of wavelengths.

To squelch such noise, physicists have turned to an idea kicked around for decades, says Kwang-Je Kim, an accelerator physicist at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (US). “People talked about it from time to time over drinks, but it was party conversation,” he says. “Nobody did any serious calculations” until the late 2000s, when Kim and others tackled the issue.

A gem of an idea to smooth out x-rays

In an x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL), an undulator magnet shakes a bunch of energetic electrons sideways so they emit x-rays. The x-rays push the electrons into subbunches that, radiating in concert, then generate a noisy tsunami of x-rays. A twist on the concept could produce more consistent, smoother x-ray pulses.

The idea is to extract part of the x-ray pulse generated by one bunch of electrons and feed it back to the entrance of the undulators just in time to overlap with the next bunch of electrons. The recirculated x-rays would serve as a seed that causes the electrons to radiate more predictably. In repeated cycles, the x-ray pulses should become very pure and smooth, with a spread of wavelengths only 1/1000th as wide as ordinary XFEL pulses.

The plan requires very special mirrors, however. X-rays blast through most material, but for 100 years, physicists have known that a perfect crystal should reflect x-rays at certain angles, depending on the x-rays’ energy and the crystal’s structure and orientation, as the x-rays diffract off parallel planes of atoms in the crystal. The crystal also acts as a filter, as it reflects x-rays in a narrow range of wavelengths. Such crystal mirrors remained an aspiration until 2010, when Yuri Shvyd’ko, an x-ray physicist at Argonne, and colleagues showed small synthetic diamonds can reflect x-rays with 99% efficiency. Fortunately, an XFEL’s beam is less than 100 micrometers wide. “You don’t need a large crystal,” Shvyd’ko says. “You need a perfect crystal of small size.”

The scheme also requires a linear accelerator with a high repetition rate, to ensure the x-ray beam encounters a fresh bunch of electrons each time it rounds its circuit of mirrors. SLAC’s original accelerator is way too slow, firing 120 times a second. The European XFEL runs at 2.2 million cycles a second, so a cavity just 136 meters long would synchronize the x-rays with the electron bunches. SLAC is installing an accelerator that will run at 1 million cycles per second starting in 2022.

To test the essential elements for a cavity-based XFEL, physicists from Argonne, SLAC, and the Japanese lab Spring-8 plan to use four crystal mirrors to build a 66-meter-long cavity around seven LCLS undulators. By fiddling with SLAC’s current accelerator, they will shoot two bunches of electrons separated by 220 nanoseconds through the undulators and hope to show that recirculating x-rays from the first bunch make the second bunch radiate more efficiently. The system should be up and running in 2023, says Gabriel Marcus, an accelerator physicist at SLAC. Researchers at the European XFEL plan to implement a slightly different design by 2024. They hope to send up to 2700 electron bunches through the undulators and watch the laser beam grow stronger and smoother with each pass.

Patrick Rauer, an x-ray physicist at The University of Hamburg [Universität Hamburg](DE) who has modeled the European XFEL project on a computer, cautions that the scheme will require extraordinary precision, with the millimeter-size diamonds aligned to a few millionths of a degree. “It’s a major problem,” Rauer says. “This is going to very difficult.” Ilya Agapov, an accelerator physicist at the DESY Electron Synchrotron[ Deütsches Elektronen-Synchrotron](DE), says that even harder will be maintaining the alignment as circulating x-rays heat the mirrors.

Still, potential users foresee major benefits. For example, Christian Gutt of The University of Siegen [Universität Siegen](DE) has used the European XFEL to study how proteins in solution diffuse and cluster on time scales as short as nanoseconds by studying correlations in the patterns of x-rays diffracted by the proteins. Those patterns would be far sharper with a cavity-based XFEL, he says. “That would be a game changer for us.”

With its extremely narrow spectrum, a cavity-based XFEL might even serve to control the quantum states of atomic nuclei much as atomic physicists now control the states of atoms with visible light, says Linda Young, an atomic physicist at Argonne. “It’s very wild,” she says. All it will take is a few mirrors—and a lot of hard work.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

From Paul Scherrer Institute [Paul Scherrer Institut] (CH) : “First light at Furka-The experiments can begin”

From Paul Scherrer Institute [Paul Scherrer Institut] (CH)

4 August 2021

Elia Razzoli, PhD
Head of the Furka Group
Laboratory for Advanced Photonics
Paul Scherrer Institute [CH]
elia.razzoli@psi.ch

Elia Razzoli, 36, did his doctoral research at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne](CH) and PSI. Two years ago, following research stays abroad, he returned to PSI, where he works at the Furka experiment station. In January 2021 he became the head of the newly established Furka Group. Photo: Paul Scherrer Institute/Mahir Dzambegovic.

It’s another milestone on the path to full operation of the SwissFEL | Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) [freies Elektron ][électron libre](CH) with five experiment stations in all: “First light” at the experiment station Furka. It clears the way for experimental possibilities that are unique worldwide. Team leader Elia Razzoli explains what the Furka Group is planning to do.

Why is “first light” such an important occasion for your team?

Elia Razzoli: It means we’re in business. Or to be more specific: Now we can begin working on the first experiments.

The general public might imagine that you simply flip a switch, and then the light is there. But presumably it’s not that simple in your case…

No, it is a complex task. When we at SwissFEL talk about light, we do not mean visible light, but rather X-ray light with characteristics that are unique in the world. To generate that light, and for research to be able to use it, several teams at PSI have to work together. With the Furka experiment station we are, so to speak, at the end of the food chain. To generate the X-ray light of SwissFEL, electrons must be forced onto a sinuous track with the aid of magnets. In the process, they emit the X-ray light that we need to carry out the actual investigations. The magnets that redirect the electrons in this way are called undulators. And they are precisely what makes the whole thing so difficult, because they have to work exactly in sync; otherwise the X-ray light doesn’t have the quality that we need. The complexity of the system grows exponentially with the number and length of the undulators. That is why first light at Furka is already a masterful technical and organisational feat.

What comes next?

The first test experiments are currently under way, in which we vary parameters to see whether everything behaves as desired. We are carrying out experiments with diffraction, in which we can measure the distances between individual atoms in crystal structures, and with absorption, where we vary the wavelength of the X-ray light and look at how much energy is absorbed in the material depending on the wavelength. This is important if we want to carry out more ambitious spectroscopic experiments later. Then, over the next six to eight months, we will start up the system and familiarise ourselves with focusing and detecting the X-ray beam. Then in 2022 we will start the first scientific experiments with external users.

What experiments are you planning?

The research area on the Athos beamline is experiments with soft X-rays. Our colleagues at the Maloja experiment station, which is already in operation, are mainly looking at liquid and gaseous substances. At Furka, we specialise in solids, which we study at very low temperatures. We can cool them down to -263 ° Celsius, around ten Kelvin above absolute zero. We use spectroscopy to observe the electrons in the atoms that are responsible for the physical properties of substances, such as superconductivity for example.

Why can that only be done at SwissFEL?

The X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL is unique in the world. It delivers pulsed X-ray light and the pulses are unimaginably short-in the range of femtoseconds or even less. That is a millionth billionth of a second. With that we can, for example, look at chemical reactions as if in a movie filmed with an extremely fast high-speed camera. For Athos, we have developed special systems called CHIC and APPLE-X that allow us to manipulate the electron beam of SwissFEL and generate X-ray light with unique properties more or less à la carte.

Will practical applications also result from this research?

The results of experiments our colleagues conducted 50 years ago can be found today in every smartphone, for instance in the semiconductor materials of the microchips. Naturally, we hope that our experiments too will one day enable advances in electronics, or in quantum computing technology. We are interested, for example, in materials whose magnetic states can be switched lightning-fast. That is of interest for coming generations of computer hard drives with extremely high storage density. But first and foremost, we are researchers who want to make new discoveries. Maybe we will even find novel quantum states, such as light-induced topological phases, that could be of fundamental importance in the search for so-called Majorana-like particles. These particles are exotic quantum states that could revolutionise our approach to quantum computing.

Were there delays in setting up Furka due to the coronavirus restrictions?

We observe the hygiene requirements, for example that there should not be too many people in the same room. Normally four to six researchers work together at an experiment station, and from time to time there are still more researchers from external partners. That was not going to work, but we organised ourselves so that there were hardly any delays. Besides, experiment stations like Furka are so automated that you can carry out a lot of tests virtually from the kitchen table.

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Paul Scherrer Institute [Paul Scherrer Institut] (CH) is the largest research institute for natural and engineering sciences within Switzerland. We perform world-class research in three main subject areas: Matter and Material; Energy and the Environment; and Human Health. By conducting fundamental and applied research, we work on long-term solutions for major challenges facing society, industry and science.

The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) is a multi-disciplinary research institute for natural and engineering sciences in Switzerland. It is located in the Canton of Aargau in the municipalities Villigen and Würenlingen on either side of the River Aare, and covers an area over 35 hectares in size. Like Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich)](CH) and EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne](CH), PSI belongs to the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain of the Swiss Confederation. The PSI employs around 2100 people. It conducts basic and applied research in the fields of matter and materials, human health, and energy and the environment. About 37% of PSI’s research activities focus on material sciences, 24% on life sciences, 19% on general energy, 11% on nuclear energy and safety, and 9% on particle physics.

PSI develops, builds and operates large and complex research facilities and makes them available to the national and international scientific communities. In 2017, for example, more than 2500 researchers from 60 different countries came to PSI to take advantage of the concentration of large-scale research facilities in the same location, which is unique worldwide. About 1900 experiments are conducted each year at the approximately 40 measuring stations in these facilities.

In recent years, the institute has been one of the largest recipients of money from the Swiss lottery fund.

Research and specialist areas

PSI develops, builds and operates several accelerator facilities, e. g. a 590 MeV high-current cyclotron, which in normal operation supplies a beam current of about 2.2 mA. PSI also operates four large-scale research facilities: a synchrotron light source (SLS), which is particularly brilliant and stable, a spallation neutron source (SINQ), a muon source (SμS) and an X-ray free-electron laser (SwissFEL). This makes PSI currently (2020) the only institute in the world to provide the four most important probes for researching the structure and dynamics of condensed matter (neutrons, muons and synchrotron radiation) on a campus for the international user community. In addition, HIPA’s target facilities also produce pions that feed the muon source and the Ultracold Neutron source UCN produces very slow, ultracold neutrons. All these particle types are used for research in particle physics.

From DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) : “AI learns physics to optimize particle accelerator performance”

From DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US)

July 29, 2021
Manuel Gnida

Teaching machine learning the basics of accelerator physics is particularly useful in situations where actual data don’t exist.

SLAC researchers have paired machine learning with physics knowledge to optimize the performance of the SPEAR3 accelerator, which is the backbone of the lab’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), shown in this photo. Credit: Brad Plummer/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource SSRL

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource SSRL

Machine learning-a form of artificial intelligence-vastly speeds up computational tasks and enables new technology in areas as broad as speech and image recognition, self-driving cars, stock market trading and medical diagnosis.

Before going to work on a given task machine learning algorithms typically need to be trained on pre-existing data so they can learn to make fast and accurate predictions about future scenarios on their own. But what if the job is a completely new one, with no data available for training?

Now, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have demonstrated that they can use machine learning to optimize the performance of particle accelerators by teaching the algorithms the basic physics principles behind accelerator operations – no prior data needed.

“Injecting physics into machine learning is a really hot topic in many research areas – in materials science, environmental science, battery research, particle physics and more,” said Adi Hanuka, a former SLAC research associate who led a study published in Physical Review Accelerator and Beams. This is one of the first examples of using physics-informed machine learning in the accelerator physics community.

Educating AI with physics

Accelerators are powerful machines that energize beams of electrons or other particles for use in a wide range of applications, including fundamental physics experiments, molecular imaging and radiation therapy for cancer. To obtain the best beam for a given application, operators need to tune the accelerator for peak performance.

When it comes to large particle accelerators this can be very challenging because there are so many components that need to be adjusted. What further complicates things is that not all components are independent, meaning that if you adjust one, it can affect the settings for another.

Recent studies at SLAC have shown that machine learning can greatly support human operators by speeding up the optimization process and finding useful accelerator settings that nobody has thought of before. Machine learning can also help diagnose the quality of particle beams without interfering with them, as other techniques usually do.

For these procedures to work, researchers first had to train the machine learning algorithms with data from previous accelerator operations, computer simulations that make assumptions about the accelerator’s performance, or both. However, they also found that using information from physics models combined with available experimental data could dramatically decrease the amount of new data required.

The new study demonstrates that prior data are, in fact, not needed if you know enough about the physics that describes how an accelerator works.

The team used this approach to tune SLAC’s SPEAR3 accelerator, which powers the lab’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL). By using information obtained directly from physics-based models, they got results that were just as good, if not better, as those achieved by training the algorithm with actual archival data, the researchers said.

“Our results are the latest highlight of a progressive push at SLAC to develop machine learning tools for tuning accelerators,” said SLAC staff scientist Joe Duris, the study’s principal investigator.

Predicting the unknown

That’s not to say that pre-existing data are not helpful. They still come in handy even if you have your physics down. In the SPEAR3 case, the researchers were able to further improve the physics-informed machine learning model by pairing it with actual data from the accelerator. The team is also applying the method to improve tuning of SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser, one of the most powerful X-ray sources on the planet, for which archival data are available from previous experimental runs.

The full potential of the new method will probably become apparent when SLAC crews turn on LCLS-II next year.

SLAC/LCLS II projected view.

This superconducting upgrade to LCLS has a brand-new accelerator, and its best settings need to be determined from scratch. Its operators may find it convenient to have AI by their side that has already learned some basics of accelerator physics.

Funding came from a DOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program at SLAC and DOE’s Office of Science (SC). LDRD and SC funded separate projects that both contributed to these results. Additional research contributions came from the University of Cambridge (UK). SSRL and LCLS are Office of Science user facilities.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and located in Menlo Park, California. It is the site of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a 3.2 kilometer (2-mile) linear accelerator constructed in 1966 and shut down in the 2000s, which could accelerate electrons to energies of 50 GeV.

Today SLAC research centers on a broad program in atomic and solid-state physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine using X-rays from synchrotron radiation and a free-electron laser as well as experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics, astroparticle physics, and cosmology.

Founded in 1962 as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the facility is located on 172 hectares (426 acres) of Stanford University-owned land on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California—just west of the University’s main campus. The main accelerator is 3.2 kilometers (2 mi) long—the longest linear accelerator in the world—and has been operational since 1966.

Research at SLAC has produced three Nobel Prizes in Physics

1976: The charm quark—see J/ψ meson
1990: Quark structure inside protons and neutrons
1995: The tau lepton

SLAC’s meeting facilities also provided a venue for the Homebrew Computer Club and other pioneers of the home computer revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1984 the laboratory was named an ASME National Historic Engineering Landmark and an IEEE Milestone.

SLAC developed and, in December 1991, began hosting the first World Wide Web server outside of Europe.

In the early-to-mid 1990s, the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC) investigated the properties of the Z boson using the Stanford Large Detector.

As of 2005, SLAC employed over 1,000 people, some 150 of whom were physicists with doctorate degrees, and served over 3,000 visiting researchers yearly, operating particle accelerators for high-energy physics and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) for synchrotron light radiation research, which was “indispensable” in the research leading to the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Stanford Professor Roger D. Kornberg.

In October 2008, the Department of Energy announced that the center’s name would be changed to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The reasons given include a better representation of the new direction of the lab and the ability to trademark the laboratory’s name. Stanford University had legally opposed the Department of Energy’s attempt to trademark “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center”.

In March 2009, it was announced that the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory was to receive $68.3 million in Recovery Act Funding to be disbursed by Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

In October 2016, Bits and Watts launched as a collaboration between SLAC and Stanford University to design “better, greener electric grids”. SLAC later pulled out over concerns about an industry partner, the state-owned Chinese electric utility.

Accelerator

The main accelerator was an RF linear accelerator that accelerated electrons and positrons up to 50 GeV. At 3.2 km (2.0 mi) long, the accelerator was the longest linear accelerator in the world, and was claimed to be “the world’s most straight object.” until 2017 when the European x-ray free electron laser opened. The main accelerator is buried 9 m (30 ft) below ground and passes underneath Interstate Highway 280. The above-ground klystron gallery atop the beamline, was the longest building in the United States until the LIGO project’s twin interferometers were completed in 1999. It is easily distinguishable from the air and is marked as a visual waypoint on aeronautical charts.

A portion of the original linear accelerator is now part of the Linac Coherent Light Source [below].

Stanford Linear Collider

The Stanford Linear Collider was a linear accelerator that collided electrons and positrons at SLAC. The center of mass energy was about 90 GeV, equal to the mass of the Z boson, which the accelerator was designed to study. Grad student Barrett D. Milliken discovered the first Z event on 12 April 1989 while poring over the previous day’s computer data from the Mark II detector. The bulk of the data was collected by the SLAC Large Detector, which came online in 1991. Although largely overshadowed by the Large Electron–Positron Collider at CERN, which began running in 1989, the highly polarized electron beam at SLC (close to 80%) made certain unique measurements possible, such as parity violation in Z Boson-b quark coupling.

European Organization for Nuclear Research [Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire](CH) LEP Collider

Presently no beam enters the south and north arcs in the machine, which leads to the Final Focus, therefore this section is mothballed to run beam into the PEP2 section from the beam switchyard.

The SLAC Large Detector (SLD) was the main detector for the Stanford Linear Collider. It was designed primarily to detect Z bosons produced by the accelerator’s electron-positron collisions. Built in 1991, the SLD operated from 1992 to 1998.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)Large Detector

PEP

PEP (Positron-Electron Project) began operation in 1980, with center-of-mass energies up to 29 GeV. At its apex, PEP had five large particle detectors in operation, as well as a sixth smaller detector. About 300 researchers made used of PEP. PEP stopped operating in 1990, and PEP-II began construction in 1994.

PEP-II

From 1999 to 2008, the main purpose of the linear accelerator was to inject electrons and positrons into the PEP-II accelerator, an electron-positron collider with a pair of storage rings 2.2 km (1.4 mi) in circumference. PEP-II was host to the BaBar experiment, one of the so-called B-Factory experiments studying charge-parity symmetry.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) BaBar

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)/SSRL

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

SLAC plays a primary role in the mission and operation of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched in August 2008. The principal scientific objectives of this mission are:

To understand the mechanisms of particle acceleration in AGNs, pulsars, and SNRs.
To resolve the gamma-ray sky: unidentified sources and diffuse emission.
To determine the high-energy behavior of gamma-ray bursts and transients.
To probe dark matter and fundamental physics.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)/Fermi Large Area Telescope

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)/Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope.

KIPAC

http://kipac.stanford.edu/kipac/campus

The Stanford PULSE Institute (PULSE) is a Stanford Independent Laboratory located in the Central Laboratory at SLAC. PULSE was created by Stanford in 2005 to help Stanford faculty and SLAC scientists develop ultrafast x-ray research at LCLS.

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS)[below] is a free electron laser facility located at SLAC. The LCLS is partially a reconstruction of the last 1/3 of the original linear accelerator at SLAC, and can deliver extremely intense x-ray radiation for research in a number of areas. It achieved first lasing in April 2009.

The laser produces hard X-rays, 10^9 times the relative brightness of traditional synchrotron sources and is the most powerful x-ray source in the world. LCLS enables a variety of new experiments and provides enhancements for existing experimental methods. Often, x-rays are used to take “snapshots” of objects at the atomic level before obliterating samples. The laser’s wavelength, ranging from 6.2 to 0.13 nm (200 to 9500 electron volts (eV)) is similar to the width of an atom, providing extremely detailed information that was previously unattainable. Additionally, the laser is capable of capturing images with a “shutter speed” measured in femtoseconds, or million-billionths of a second, necessary because the intensity of the beam is often high enough so that the sample explodes on the femtosecond timescale.

The LCLS-II [below] project is to provide a major upgrade to LCLS by adding two new X-ray laser beams. The new system will utilize the 500 m (1,600 ft) of existing tunnel to add a new superconducting accelerator at 4 GeV and two new sets of undulators that will increase the available energy range of LCLS. The advancement from the discoveries using this new capabilities may include new drugs, next-generation computers, and new materials.

FACET

In 2012, the first two-thirds (~2 km) of the original SLAC LINAC were recommissioned for a new user facility, the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET). This facility was capable of delivering 20 GeV, 3 nC electron (and positron) beams with short bunch lengths and small spot sizes, ideal for beam-driven plasma acceleration studies. The facility ended operations in 2016 for the constructions of LCLS-II which will occupy the first third of the SLAC LINAC. The FACET-II project will re-establish electron and positron beams in the middle third of the LINAC for the continuation of beam-driven plasma acceleration studies in 2019.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) FACET

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) FACET-II upgrading its Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) – a test bed for new technologies that could revolutionize the way we build particle accelerators.

The Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA) is a 60-120 MeV high-brightness electron beam linear accelerator used for experiments on advanced beam manipulation and acceleration techniques. It is located at SLAC’s end station B

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA)

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory campus

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)/LCLS

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)/LCLS II projected view

[caption id="attachment_165469" align="alignnone" width="632"] Magnets called undulators stretch roughly 100 meters down a tunnel at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with one side (right) producing hard x-rays and the other soft x-rays.Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

SSRL and LCLS are DOE Office of Science user facilities.

Stanford University (US)

Leland and Jane Stanford founded the University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.

As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.

Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.

Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)(originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.

Land

Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.

Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.

On the founding grant:

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.

Off the founding grant:

Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.

Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.

The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.

China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University(CN) (KIAA-PKU).

Administration and organization

Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.[83] A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).

The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.

As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.

Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Endowment and donations

The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University(US), the University of Texas System(US), and Yale University(US) had larger endowments than Stanford.

In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Research centers and institutes

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with UC Berkeley(US) and UC San Francisco(US), Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

Discoveries and innovation

Natural sciences

Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.

Computer and applied sciences

ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.

Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.

Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.

Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.

RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and UC Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.

Businesses and entrepreneurship

Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.

The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:

Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.[163]
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).

Student body

Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.

Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.

As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.

Athletics

As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.

Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Traditions

The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.

Award laureates and scholars

Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:

19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

From Texas A&M University (US) : “Ultrafast X-ray provides new look at plasma discharge breakdown in water”

From Texas A&M University (US)

July 21, 2021
Steve Kuhlmann

Christopher Campbell and Dr. Xin Tang work to record plasma discharge in the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (US) Advanced Photon Source (US). | Image: Courtesy of Dr. David Staack.

DOE Argonne National Laboratory (US) Advanced Photo Source

ANL DOE Argonne National Laboratory (US) Advanced Photo Source

Occurring faster than the speed of sound, the mystery behind the breakdown of plasma discharges in water is one step closer to being understood as researchers pursue applying new diagnostic processes using state-of-the-art X-ray imaging to the challenging subject.

These diagnostic processes open the door to a better understanding of plasma physics, which could lead to advances in green energy production through methods including fusion, hydrocarbon reforming and hydrogen generation.

Dr. David Staack and Christopher Campbell in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University are part of the team pioneering this approach to assessing plasma processes. Partners on the project include diagnostics experts from DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratories (US) and using the facilities at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory Advanced Photon Source (APS) (US).

The team is working with LTEOIL on patented research into the use of multiphase plasma in carbon-free fuel reforming. The research is supported by the dynamic materials properties campaign (C2) and the advanced diagnostics campaign (C3) at Los Alamos National Laboratories through the Thermonuclear Plasma Physics group (P4) principal investigator, Zhehui (Jeph) Wang.

The research, which was recently published in Physical Review Research, is producing the first-known ultrafast X-ray images of pulsed plasma initiation processes in water. Staack, associate professor and Sallie and Don Davis ’61 Career Development Professor, said these new images provide valuable insight into how plasma behaves in liquid.

“Our lab is working with industry sponsors on patented research into the use of multiphase plasma in carbon-free fuel reforming,” Staack said. “By understanding this plasma physics, we are able to efficiently convert tar and recycled plastics into hydrogen and fuels for automobiles without any greenhouse gas emissions. In the future, these investigations may lead to improvements in inertial confinement fusion energy sources.”

Inertial confinement fusion — in which high temperature high energy density plasmas are generated — is a specific focus of the project. To better understand the plasma physics involved in this type of fusion, Staack said the team is developing short timescale, high-speed imaging and diagnostic techniques utilizing a simple, low-cost plasma discharge system.

Additionally, they are seeking to better understand the phenomena that occur when plasma is discharged in liquid, causing a rapid release of energy resulting in low-density microfractures in the water that move at over 20 times the speed of sound.

Even using state-of-the-art X-ray imaging, the plasma discharge occurs so quickly that researchers were only able to record one frame per event. | Image: Courtesy of Dr. David Staack.

Campbell, a graduate research assistant and Ph.D. candidate, said the team hopes their discoveries can prove to be a valuable contribution to the collective knowledge of their field as researchers seek to develop robust predictive models for how plasma will react in liquid.

“Our goal is to experimentally probe the regions and timescales of interest surrounding this plasma using ultrafast X-ray and visible imaging techniques, thereby contributing new data to the ongoing literature discussion in this area,” said Campbell. “With a complete conceptual model, we could more efficiently learn how to apply these plasmas in new ways and also improve existing applications.”

Although they have made progress, Campbell said current methods are not yet sophisticated enough to collect multiple images of a single plasma event in such a short amount of time — less than 100 nanoseconds.

“Even with the state-of-the-art techniques and fast framerates available at the Advanced Photon Source, we have only been able to image a single frame during the entire event of interest — by the next video frame, most of the fastest plasma processes have concluded,” Campbell said. “This work highlights several resourceful techniques we have developed to make the most of what few images we are able to take of these fastest processes.”

The team is currently working to measure the pressures induced by the rapid phenomena and preparing for a second round of measurements at APS to investigate interacting discharges, discharges in different fluids and processes that may limit confinement of higher energy discharges. They look forward to the opportunity of using even higher-framerate X-ray imaging methods ranging up to 6.7 million frames per second, compared to 271 thousand frames per second in this study.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Texas A&M University (US) is a public land-grant research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of 2020, Texas A&M’s student body is the second largest in the United States. Texas A&M’s designation as a land, sea, and space grant institution—the only university in Texas to hold all three designations—reflects a range of research with ongoing projects funded by organizations such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (US), the National Institutes of Health (US), the National Science Foundation (US), and the Office of Naval Research (US). In 2001, Texas A&M was inducted as a member of the Association of American Universities (US). The school’s students, alumni—over 500,000 strong—and sports teams are known as Aggies. The Texas A&M Aggies athletes compete in 18 varsity sports as a member of the Southeastern Conference.

The first public institution of higher education in Texas, the school opened on October 4, 1876, as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas under the provisions of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts. It is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. Originally, the college taught no classes in agriculture, instead concentrating on classical studies, languages, literature, and applied mathematics. After four years, students could attain degrees in scientific agriculture, civil and mechanical engineering, and language and literature. Under the leadership of President James Earl Rudder in the 1960s, A.M.C. desegregated, became coeducational, and dropped the requirement for participation in the Corps of Cadets. To reflect the institution’s expanded roles and academic offerings, the Texas Legislature renamed the school to Texas A&M University in 1963. The letters “A&M”, originally A.M.C. and short for “Agricultural and Mechanical College”, are retained as a link to the university’s tradition.

The main campus is one of the largest in the United States, spanning 5,200 acres (21 km^2), and is home to the George Bush Presidential Library. About one-fifth of the student body lives on campus. Texas A&M has more than 1,000 officially recognized student organizations. Many students also observe the traditions, which govern daily life, as well as special occasions, including sports events. Working with various A&M-related agencies, the school has a direct presence in each of the 254 counties in Texas. The university offers degrees in more than 150 courses of study through ten colleges and houses 18 research institutes.

As a Senior Military College, Texas A&M is one of six American public universities with a full-time, volunteer Corps of Cadets who study alongside civilian undergraduate students.

Research

The Texas A&M University System, in 2006, was the first to explicitly state in its policy that technology commercialization was a criterion that could be used for tenure. Passage of this policy was intended to give faculty more academic freedom and strengthen the university’s industry partnerships. Texas A&M works with both state and university agencies on various local and international research projects to forge innovations in science and technology that can have commercial applications. This work is concentrated in two primary locations–Research Valley and Research Park. Research Valley, an alliance of educational and business organizations, consists of 11,400 acres (50 km^2) with 2,500,000 square feet (232,000 m^2) of dedicated research space. An additional 350 acres (1 km^2), with 500,000 square feet (46,000 m^2) of research space, is located in Research Park. Among the school’s research entities are the Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine, the Texas Transportation Institute, the Cyclotron Institute, the Institute of Biosciences and Technology, and the Institute for Plant Genomics and Biotechnology. Texas A&M University is a member of the SEC Academic Consortium.

In 2017 Texas A&M ranked 19th nationally in R&D spending with total expenditure of $905.5 million. In 2004, Texas A&M System faculty and research submitted 121 new inventions and established 78 new royalty-bearing licensing agreements; the innovations resulted in income of $8 million. The Texas A&M Technology Licensing Office filed for 88 patents for protection of intellectual property in 2004.

Spearheaded by the College of Veterinary Medicine, Texas A&M scientists created the first cloned pet, a cat named ‘cc’, on December 22, 2001. Texas A&M was also the first academic institution to clone each of six different species: cattle, a Boer goat, pigs, a cat, a deer and a horse.

In 2004, Texas A&M joined a consortium of universities and countries to build the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile; the largest optical telescope ever constructed, the facility has seven mirrors, each with a diameter of 8.4 meters (9.2 yd).

Giant Magellan Telescope(CL) 21 meters, to be at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s(US) NSF (US) NOIRLab(US) NOAO(US) Las Campanas Observatory(CL) some 115 km (71 mi) north-northeast of La Serena, Chile, over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.

This gives the telescope the equivalent of a 24.5 meters (26.8 yd) primary mirror and is ten times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. Ground-breaking for the construction of the telescope began in November 2015.

As part of a collaboration with the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration(US), Texas A&M completed the first conversion of a nuclear research reactor from using highly enriched uranium fuel (70%) to utilizing low-enriched uranium (20%).

The eighteen-month project ended on October 13, 2006, after the first ever refueling of the reactor, thus fulfilling a portion of U.S. President George W. Bush’s Global Nuclear Threat Reduction Initiative.

TAMU researchers have named the largest volcano on Earth, Tamu Massif, after the university.

In 2016, the university was targeted by animal rights group PETA, who alleged abusive experiments on dogs. Texas A&M responded that a video had been posted by PETA with insufficient context, and it said that the dogs had a genetic condition that also affects humans — Duchenne muscular dystrophy — for which there is no cure. “The dogs — who are already affected by this disease — are treated with the utmost respect and exceptional care on site by board-certified veterinarians and highly trained staff. The care team is further subject to scientific oversight by agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Muscular Dystrophy Association, among other regulatory bodies.”

Worldwide

Texas A&M has participated in more than 500 research projects in more than 80 countries and leads the Southwestern United States in annual research expenditures. The university conducts research on every continent and has formal research and exchange agreements with 100 institutions in 40 countries. Texas A&M ranks 13th among U.S. research universities in exchange agreements with institutions abroad and student participation in study abroad programs, and has strong research collaborations with the National Natural Science Foundation of China [国家自然科学基金] (CN)and many leading universities in China.

Texas A&M owns three international facilities, a multipurpose center in Mexico City, Mexico, the Soltis Research and Education Center near the town of San Isidro, Costa Rica, and the Santa Chiara Study Abroad Center in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy. In 2003, over 1,200 Aggie students, primarily undergraduates, studied abroad. Marine research occurs on the university’s branch campus, Texas A&M University at Galveston. It also has collaborations with international facilities such as the Hacienda Santa Clara in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato.

Texas A&M’s Center for International Business Studies is one of 28 supported by the Department of Education (US). The university is also one of only two American universities in partnership with CONACyT – Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología [Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología] (CONACYT)(MX), Mexico’s equivalent of the National Science Foundation, to support research in areas including biotechnology, telecommunications, energy, and urban development. In addition, the university is the home of “Las Americas Digital Research Network”, an online architecture network for 26 universities in 12 nations, primarily in Central and South America.

Texas A&M has a campus in Education City, Doha, Qatar. The campus is part of Qatar’s “massive venture to import elite higher education from the United States”. TAMUQ was set up through an agreement between Texas A&M and the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, a foundation started in 1995 by then-emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his wife and mother of the current emir, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. TAMUQ was opened in 2003, and the current contract extends through 2023. The campus offers undergraduate degrees in chemical, electrical, mechanical and petroleum engineering and a graduate degree in chemical engineering. TAMUQ has received numerous awards for its research. Texas A&M receives $76.2 million per year from the Qatar Foundation for the campus. In the agreement with the Qatar Foundation, TAMU agreed that 70% of its undergraduate population at its Qatar campus would be Qatari citizens. The curriculum aims to “duplicate as closely as possible” the curriculum at College Station, but questions constantly arise over whether this is possible due to Qatar’s strict stance on some of the freedoms granted to U.S. students. TAMU has also been the subject of criticism over its Qatari campus due to Qatar’s support of global terrorism and appalling human rights record. Texas A&M Aggie Conservatives, a campus activism group, has spoken out against the campus and called for its immediate closure on the grounds that it violates a commitment to educating Texans, and diminishes the credibility of engineering degrees earned by students at College Station.

In late 2013, Texas A&M signed an agreement to open a $200 million campus in Nazareth, Israel as a “peace campus” for Arabs and Israelis. The agreement led to protests from students at the Qatari campus who claimed that it was “an insult to [their] people”. The campus was never opened. Instead, Texas A&M opened a $6 million marine biology center in Haifa, Israel.

From Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics via Science Magazine: “This is the first mini particle accelerator to power a laser”

From Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics

via

Science Magazine

Jul. 25, 2021
Adrian Cho

From the laser and gas target (left) to the undulators (blue) and electromagnetic spectrometer (right), the novel free-electron laser measures just 12 meters in length. Credit: Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (CN).

For 2 decades, physicists have strived to miniaturize particle accelerators—the huge machines that serve as atom smashers and x-ray sources. That effort just took a big step, as physicists in China used a small “plasma wakefield accelerator” to power a type of laser called a free-electron laser (FEL). The 12-meter-long FEL isn’t nearly as good as its kilometers-long predecessors. Still, other researchers say the experiment marks a major advance in mini accelerators.

“A lot of [scientists] will be looking at this like, ‘Yeah, that’s very impressive!’” says Jeroen van Tilborg, a laser-plasma physicist at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US) who was not involved in the work. Ke Feng, a physicist at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) who worked on the new FEL, isn’t claiming it’s ready for applications. “Making such devices useful and miniature is always our goal,” Feng says, “but there is still a lot of work to do.”

Particle accelerators are workhorses in myriad fields of science, blasting out fundamental particles and generating intense beams of x-rays for studies of biomolecules and materials. Such accelerators stretch kilometers in length and cost $1 billion or more. That’s because within a conventional accelerator, charged particles such as electrons can gain energy only so quickly. Grouped in compact bunches, the particles zip through a vacuum pipe and pass through cavities that resonate with microwaves. Much as an ocean wave propels a surfer, these microwaves push the electrons and increase their energy. However, if the oscillating electric field in the microwaves grows too strong, it will set off damaging sparks. So, the particles can gain a maximum of about 100 megaelectron volts (MeV) of energy per meter of cavity.

To accelerate particles in shorter distances, physicists need stronger electric fields. Firing a pulse of laser light into a gas such as helium is one way to generate them. The light rips electrons from the atoms, creating a tsunami of ionization that moves through the gas, followed by a wake of rippling electrons that produces an extremely strong electric field. That wakefield can scoop up electrons and accelerate them to 1000 MeV in just a few centimeters.

Physicists hoping to harness wakefields have shown they can generate very short, intense bursts of electrons. But within a burst, the energies of those electrons typically vary by a few percent, too much for most practical applications. Now, SIOM physicist Wentao Wang, Feng, and colleagues have improved the output of their plasma wakefield accelerator enough to do something potentially useful with it: power an FEL.

In an FEL, physicists fire electrons down a vacuum pipe and through a line devices called undulators. Within an undulator, small magnets above and below the beam pipe lined up like teeth, with the north poles of neighboring magnets alternating up and down. As electrons pass through the undulators, the rippled magnetic field shakes them back and forth, causing them to emit light. As the light builds up and travels along with the bunch of electrons, it pushes back on the electrons and separates them into sub-bunches that then radiate in concert to amplify the light into a laser beam.

The world’s first x-ray laser, at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, is an FEL powered by the lab’s famous 3-kilometer long linear accelerator.

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory campus with world’s first x-ray laser- the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) unveiled in 2009.

Researchers in Europe and Japan have also built large x-ray FELs. But by shooting the electron beam from their plasma wakefield accelerator through a chain of three 1.5-meter-long undulators, the SIOM team has made an FEL small enough to fit into a long room.

To make that possible, SIOM physicists had to shrink the spread in the electrons’ energy to 0.5%. They succeeded by optimizing the laser and the gas target to better control the electrons’ acceleration send them more smoothly down the vacuum pipe, Wang says. Teams in the United States and Europe have explored more complex schemes for filtering out electrons of a specific energy, but the SIOM team took a simpler approach, van Tilborg says. “Everything is just a little better optimized,” he says.

Others had used plasma wakefield accelerators to coax light out of undulators before. But Wang and colleagues demonstrated amplification, showing the light’s intensity increases 100-fold in the third undulator, they report this week in Nature. “This a huge step forward,” says Agostino Marinelli, an accelerator physicist at DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US).

The tiny FEL is a far cry from its bigger brethren, which generate beams billions of times brighter than other x-ray sources, with an energy spread as low as 0.1%. The new FEL produces much fainter pulses of longer wavelength ultraviolet light with an energy spread of 2%. SLAC researchers are also upgrading the LCLS to produce millions of pulses per second; the novel FEL can produce 5 per second.

SLAC/LCLS II schematic.

Reaching x-ray wavelengths with the device will be difficult, Marinelli predicts. “These are very impressive results, but I would be very careful of extrapolating this to x-ray energies,” Still, the SIOM team says that’s their goal. “It is hard to say how long it will take to reach the hard x-ray wavelengths, maybe a decade or longer,” says Ruxin Li, an SIOM physicist and team member. “We look forward to that day.”

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

From DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (US) and Paul Scherrer Institute [Paul Scherrer Institut] (CH) : “Understanding the Physics in New Metals”

From DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (US)

and

Paul Scherrer Institute [Paul Scherrer Institut] (CH)

July 19, 2021

Barbara Vonarburg, Paul Scherrer Institute

Brookhaven Lab Scientist Jonathan Pelliciari now works as a beamline scientist at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)[below], where he continues to use inelastic resonant x-ray scattering to study quantum materials such as correlated metals.

Researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), working in an international team, have developed a new method for complex X-ray studies that will aid in better understanding so-called correlated metals. These materials could prove useful for practical applications in areas such as superconductivity; data processing; and quantum computers. Today the researchers present their work in the journal Physical Review X.

In substances such as silicon or aluminium, the mutual repulsion of electrons hardly affects the material properties. Not so with so-called correlated materials, in which the electrons interact strongly with one another. The movement of one electron in a correlated material leads to a complex and coordinated reaction of the other electrons. It is precisely such coupled processes that make these correlated materials so promising for practical applications, and at the same time so complicated to understand.

Strongly correlated materials are candidates for novel high-temperature superconductors, which can conduct electricity without loss and which are used in medicine, for example, in magnetic resonance imaging. They also could be used to build electronic components, or even quantum computers, with which data can be more efficiently processed and stored.

“Strongly correlated materials exhibit a wealth of fascinating phenomena,” says Thorsten Schmitt, head of the Spectroscopy of Novel Materials Group at PSI: “However, it remains a major challenge to understand and exploit the complex behaviour that lies behind these phenomena.” Schmitt and his research group tackle this task with the help of a method for which they use the intense and extremely precise X-ray radiation from the Swiss Light Source SLS at PSI.

Swiss Light Source SLS Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI)

This modern technique, which has been further developed at PSI in recent years, is called resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, or RIXS for short.

Thorsten Schmitt at the experiment station of the Swiss Light Source SLS, which provided the X-ray light used for the experiments. Credit: Mahir Dzambegovic/Paul Scherrer Institute.

X-rays excite electrons

With RIXS, soft X-rays are scattered off a sample. The incident X-ray beam is tuned in such a way that it elevates electrons from a lower electron orbital to a higher orbital, which means that special resonances are excited. This throws the system out of balance. Various electrodynamic processes lead it back to the ground state. Some of the excess energy is emitted again as X-ray light. The spectrum of this inelastically scattered radiation provides information about the underlying processes and thus on the electronic structure of the material.

“In recent years, RIXS has developed into a powerful experimental tool for deciphering the complexity of correlated materials,” Schmitt explains. When used to investigate correlated insulators in particular, it works very well. Up to now, however, the method has been unsuccessful in probing correlated metals. Its failure was due to the difficulty of interpreting the extremely complicated spectra caused by many different electrodynamic processes during the scattering. “In this connection collaboration with theorists is essential,” explains Schmitt, “because they can simulate the processes observed in the experiment.”

Calculations of correlated metals

This is a specialty of theoretical physicist Keith Gilmore, formerly of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in the USA and now at the Humboldt University of Berlin [Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin] (DE). “Calculating the RIXS results for correlated metals is difficult because you have to handle several electron orbitals, large bandwidths, and a large number of electronic interactions at the same time,” says Gilmore. Correlated insulators are easier to handle because fewer orbitals are involved; this allows model calculations that explicitly include all electrons. To be precise, Gilmore explains: “In our new method of describing the RIXS processes, we are now combining the contributions that come from the excitation of one electron with the coordinated reaction of all other electrons.”

To test the calculation, the PSI researchers experimented with a substance that BNL scientist Jonathan Pelliciari had investigated in detail as part of his doctoral thesis at PSI: barium-iron-arsenide. If you add a specific amount of potassium atoms to the material, it becomes superconducting. It belongs to a class of unconventional high-temperature iron-based superconductors that are expected to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon. “Until now, the interpretation of RIXS measurements on such complex materials has been guided mainly by intuition. Now these RIXS calculations give us experimenters a framework that enables a more practical interpretation of the results. Our RIXS measurements at PSI on barium-iron-arsenide are in excellent agreement with the calculated profiles,” Pelliciari says.

Combination of experiment and theory

In their experiments, the researchers investigated the physics around the iron atom. “One advantage of RIXS is that you can concentrate on a specific component and examine it in detail for materials that consist of several elements,” Schmitt says. The well-tuned X-ray beam causes an inner electron in the iron atom to be elevated from the ground state in the core level to the higher energy valence band, which is only partially occupied. This initial excitation of the core electron can cause further secondary excitations and trigger many complicated decay processes that ultimately manifest themselves in spectral satellite structures. (See graphic.)

The graphic shows how an electron (blue dot) can be elevated to different energy levels (dotted arrows) or falls back to lower energy levels. Between the highest energy level and somewhat lower level, secondary processes take place. The curve in the background represents the iron electronic levels.
Credit: Keith Gilmore/Paul Scherrer Institute.

Since the contributions of the many reactions are sometimes small and close to one another, it is difficult to find out which processes actually took place in the experiment. Here the combination of experiment and theory helps. “If you have no theoretical support for difficult experiments, you cannot understand the processes, that is, the physics, in detail,” Schmitt says. The same also applies to theory: “You often don’t know which theories are realistic until you can compare them with an experiment. Progress in understanding comes when experiment and theory are brought together. This descriptive method thus has the potential to become a reference for the interpretation of spectroscopic experiments on correlated metals.”

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Paul Scherrer Institute [Paul Scherrer Institut] (CH) is the largest research institute for natural and engineering sciences within Switzerland. We perform world-class research in three main subject areas: Matter and Material; Energy and the Environment; and Human Health. By conducting fundamental and applied research, we work on long-term solutions for major challenges facing society, industry and science.

The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) is a multi-disciplinary research institute for natural and engineering sciences in Switzerland. It is located in the Canton of Aargau in the municipalities Villigen and Würenlingen on either side of the River Aare, and covers an area over 35 hectares in size. Like Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich)](CH) and EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne](CH), PSI belongs to the Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles polytechniques fédérales](CH). The PSI employs around 2100 people. It conducts basic and applied research in the fields of matter and materials, human health, and energy and the environment. About 37% of PSI’s research activities focus on material sciences, 24% on life sciences, 19% on general energy, 11% on nuclear energy and safety, and 9% on particle physics.

PSI develops, builds and operates large and complex research facilities and makes them available to the national and international scientific communities. In 2017, for example, more than 2500 researchers from 60 different countries came to PSI to take advantage of the concentration of large-scale research facilities in the same location, which is unique worldwide. About 1900 experiments are conducted each year at the approximately 40 measuring stations in these facilities.

In recent years, the institute has been one of the largest recipients of money from the Swiss lottery fund.

Research and specialist areas

PSI develops, builds and operates several accelerator facilities, e. g. a 590 MeV high-current cyclotron, which in normal operation supplies a beam current of about 2.2 mA. PSI also operates four large-scale research facilities: a synchrotron light source (SLS), which is particularly brilliant and stable, a spallation neutron source (SINQ), a muon source (SμS) and an X-ray free-electron laser (SwissFEL). This makes PSI currently (2020) the only institute in the world to provide the four most important probes for researching the structure and dynamics of condensed matter (neutrons, muons and synchrotron radiation) on a campus for the international user community. In addition, HIPA’s target facilities also produce pions that feed the muon source and the Ultracold Neutron source UCN produces very slow, ultracold neutrons. All these particle types are used for research in particle physics.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the DOE(US) Office of Science, DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (US) conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. The Laboratory’s almost 3,000 scientists, engineers, and support staff are joined each year by more than 5,000 visiting researchers from around the world. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University(US), the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle(US), a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

Research at BNL specializes in nuclear and high energy physics, energy science and technology, environmental and bioscience, nanoscience and national security. The 5,300 acre campus contains several large research facilities, including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [below] and National Synchrotron Light Source II [below]. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work conducted at Brookhaven lab.

BNL is staffed by approximately 2,750 scientists, engineers, technicians, and support personnel, and hosts 4,000 guest investigators every year. The laboratory has its own police station, fire department, and ZIP code (11973). In total, the lab spans a 5,265-acre (21 km^2) area that is mostly coterminous with the hamlet of Upton, New York. BNL is served by a rail spur operated as-needed by the New York and Atlantic Railway. Co-located with the laboratory is the Upton, New York, forecast office of the National Weather Service.

Major programs

Although originally conceived as a nuclear research facility, Brookhaven Lab’s mission has greatly expanded. Its foci are now:

Nuclear and high-energy physics
Physics and chemistry of materials
Environmental and climate research
Nanomaterials
Energy research
Nonproliferation
Structural biology
Accelerator physics

Operation

Brookhaven National Lab was originally owned by the Atomic Energy Commission(US) and is now owned by that agency’s successor, the United States Department of Energy (DOE). DOE subcontracts the research and operation to universities and research organizations. It is currently operated by Brookhaven Science Associates LLC, which is an equal partnership of Stony Brook University(US) and Battelle Memorial Institute(US). From 1947 to 1998, it was operated by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) (US), but AUI lost its contract in the wake of two incidents: a 1994 fire at the facility’s high-beam flux reactor that exposed several workers to radiation and reports in 1997 of a tritium leak into the groundwater of the Long Island Central Pine Barrens on which the facility sits.

Foundations

Following World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission was created to support government-sponsored peacetime research on atomic energy. The effort to build a nuclear reactor in the American northeast was fostered largely by physicists Isidor Isaac Rabi and Norman Foster Ramsey Jr., who during the war witnessed many of their colleagues at Columbia University leave for new remote research sites following the departure of the Manhattan Project from its campus. Their effort to house this reactor near New York City was rivalled by a similar effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) to have a facility near Boston, Massachusettes(US). Involvement was quickly solicited from representatives of northeastern universities to the south and west of New York City such that this city would be at their geographic center. In March 1946 a nonprofit corporation was established that consisted of representatives from nine major research universities — Columbia University(US), Cornell University(US), Harvard University(US), Johns Hopkins University(US), Massachusetts Institute of Technology(US), Princeton University(US), University of Pennsylvania(US), University of Rochester(US), and Yale University(US).

Out of 17 considered sites in the Boston-Washington corridor, Camp Upton on Long Island was eventually chosen as the most suitable in consideration of space, transportation, and availability. The camp had been a training center from the US Army during both World War I and World War II. After the latter war, Camp Upton was deemed no longer necessary and became available for reuse. A plan was conceived to convert the military camp into a research facility.

On March 21, 1947, the Camp Upton site was officially transferred from the U.S. War Department to the new U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), predecessor to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Research and facilities

Reactor history

In 1947 construction began on the first nuclear reactor at Brookhaven, the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor. This reactor, which opened in 1950, was the first reactor to be constructed in the United States after World War II. The High Flux Beam Reactor operated from 1965 to 1999. In 1959 Brookhaven built the first US reactor specifically tailored to medical research, the Brookhaven Medical Research Reactor, which operated until 2000.

Accelerator history

In 1952 Brookhaven began using its first particle accelerator, the Cosmotron. At the time the Cosmotron was the world’s highest energy accelerator, being the first to impart more than 1 GeV of energy to a particle.

BNL Cosmotron 1952-1966

The Cosmotron was retired in 1966, after it was superseded in 1960 by the new Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS).

BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS)

The AGS was used in research that resulted in 3 Nobel prizes, including the discovery of the muon neutrino, the charm quark, and CP violation.

In 1970 in BNL started the ISABELLE project to develop and build two proton intersecting storage rings.

The groundbreaking for the project was in October 1978. In 1981, with the tunnel for the accelerator already excavated, problems with the superconducting magnets needed for the ISABELLE accelerator brought the project to a halt, and the project was eventually cancelled in 1983.

The National Synchrotron Light Source (US) operated from 1982 to 2014 and was involved with two Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. It has since been replaced by the National Synchrotron Light Source II (US) [below].

BNL National Synchrotron Light Source (US).

After ISABELLE’S cancellation, physicist at BNL proposed that the excavated tunnel and parts of the magnet assembly be used in another accelerator. In 1984 the first proposal for the accelerator now known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)[below] was put forward. The construction got funded in 1991 and RHIC has been operational since 2000. One of the world’s only two operating heavy-ion colliders, RHIC is as of 2010 the second-highest-energy collider after the Large Hadron Collider(CH). RHIC is housed in a tunnel 2.4 miles (3.9 km) long and is visible from space.

On January 9, 2020, It was announced by Paul Dabbar, undersecretary of the US Department of Energy Office of Science, that the BNL eRHIC design has been selected over the conceptual design put forward by DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility [Jlab] (US) as the future Electron–ion collider (EIC) in the United States.

Brookhaven Lab Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) (US) to be built inside the tunnel that currently houses the RHIC.

In addition to the site selection, it was announced that the BNL EIC had acquired CD-0 (mission need) from the Department of Energy. BNL’s eRHIC design proposes upgrading the existing Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which collides beams light to heavy ions including polarized protons, with a polarized electron facility, to be housed in the same tunnel.

Other discoveries

In 1958, Brookhaven scientists created one of the world’s first video games, Tennis for Two. In 1968 Brookhaven scientists patented Maglev, a transportation technology that utilizes magnetic levitation.

Major facilities

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which was designed to research quark–gluon plasma and the sources of proton spin. Until 2009 it was the world’s most powerful heavy ion collider. It is the only collider of spin-polarized protons.
Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), used for the study of nanoscale materials.
BNL National Synchrotron Light Source II(US), Brookhaven’s newest user facility, opened in 2015 to replace the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), which had operated for 30 years.[19] NSLS was involved in the work that won the 2003 and 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, a particle accelerator that was used in three of the lab’s Nobel prizes.
Accelerator Test Facility, generates, accelerates and monitors particle beams.
Tandem Van de Graaff, once the world’s largest electrostatic accelerator.
Computational Science resources, including access to a massively parallel Blue Gene series supercomputer that is among the fastest in the world for scientific research, run jointly by Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University.
Interdisciplinary Science Building, with unique laboratories for studying high-temperature superconductors and other materials important for addressing energy challenges.
NASA Space Radiation Laboratory, where scientists use beams of ions to simulate cosmic rays and assess the risks of space radiation to human space travelers and equipment.

Off-site contributions

It is a contributing partner to ATLAS experiment, one of the four detectors located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

European Organization for Nuclear Research (Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire)(EU) [CERN] map

Iconic view of the European Organization for Nuclear Research [Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire](CH)CERN ATLAS detector

It is currently operating at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

Brookhaven was also responsible for the design of the SNS accumulator ring in partnership with Spallation Neutron Source at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US), Tennessee.

DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory(US) Spallation Neutron Source annotated.

Brookhaven plays a role in a range of neutrino research projects around the world, including the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment (CN) nuclear power plant, approximately 52 kilometers northeast of Hong Kong and 45 kilometers east of Shenzhen, China.

Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment (CN) nuclear power plant, approximately 52 kilometers northeast of Hong Kong and 45 kilometers east of Shenzhen, China ,

FNAL DUNE LBNF (US) from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota, USA

Brookhaven Campus

BNL Center for Functional Nanomaterials.

BNL National Synchrotron Light Source II(US).

BNL NSLS II (US).

BNL Relative Heavy Ion Collider (US) Campus.

BNL/RHIC Star Detector.

BNL/RHIC Phenix detector.

From University of Strathclyde [Oilthigh Shrath Chluaidh] (SCT): “The paradox of a free-electron laser without the laser: a new source of coherent radiation”

From University of Strathclyde [Oilthigh Shrath Chluaidh] (SCT)

16 July 2021

A new way of producing coherent light in the ultra-violet spectral region, which points the way to developing brilliant table-top x-ray sources, has been produced in research led at the University of Strathclyde.

The scientists have developed a type of ultra-short wavelength coherent light source that does not require laser action to produce coherence. Common electron-beam based light sources-known as fourth-generation light sources-are based on the free-electron laser (FEL) which uses an undulator to convert electron beam energy into X-rays.

Coherent light sources are powerful tools that enable research in many areas of medicine, biology, material sciences, chemistry and physics.

Making ultraviolet and X-ray coherent light sources more widely available would transform the way science is done; a university could have one of the devices in a single room, on a table top, for a reasonable price.

The group is now planning a proof-of-principle experiment in the ultraviolet spectral range to demonstrate this new way of producing coherent light. If successful, it should dramatically accelerate the development of even shorter wavelength coherent sources based on the same principle. The Strathclyde group has set up a facility to investigate these types of sources: the Scottish Centre for the Application of Plasma-based Accelerators (SCAPA), which hosts one of the highest power lasers in the UK.

The new research has been published in Scientific Reports.

Professor Dino Jaroszynski, of Strathclyde’s Department of Physics, led the research. He said: “This work significantly advances the state-of-the-art of synchrotron sources by proposing a new method of producing short-wavelength coherent radiation, using a short undulator and attosecond duration electron bunches.

“This is more compact and less demanding on the electron beam quality than free-electron lasers and could provide a paradigm shift in light sources, which would stimulate a new direction of research. It proposes to use bunch compression – as in chirped pulse amplification lasers – within the undulator to significantly enhance the radiation brightness.

“The new method presented would be of wide interest to a diverse community developing and using light sources.”

In FELs, as in all lasers, the intensity of light is amplified by a feedback mechanism that locks the phases of individual radiators, which in this case are “free” electrons. In the FEL, this is achieved by passing a high energy electron beam through the undulator, which is an array of alternating polarity magnets.

Light emitted from the electrons as they wiggle through the undulator creates a force called the ponderomotive force that bunches the electrons – some are slowed down, some are sped up, which causes bunching, similar to traffic on a motorway periodically slowing and speeding up.

Electrons passing through the undulator radiate incoherent light if they are uniformly distributed – for every electron that emits light, there is another electron that partially cancels out the light because they radiate out of phase. An analogy of this partial cancelling out is rain on the sea: it produces many small ripples that partially cancel each other out, effectively quelling the waves – reducing their amplitude. In contrast, steady or pulsating wind will cause the waves to amplify through the mutual interaction of the wind with the sea.

In the FEL, electron bunching causes amplification of the light and the increase in its coherence, which usually takes a long time – thus very long undulators are required. In an X-ray FEL, the undulators can be more than a hundred metres long. The accelerators driving these X-ray FELs are kilometres long, which makes these devices very expensive and some of the largest instruments in the world.

However, using a free-electron laser to produce coherent radiation is not the only way; a “pre-bunched” beam or ultra-short electron bunch can also be used to achieve exactly the same coherence in a very short undulator that is less than a metre in length. As long as the electron bunch is shorter than the wavelength of the light produced by the undulator, it will automatically produce coherent light – all the light waves will add up or interfere constructively, which leads to very brilliant light with exactly the same properties of light from a laser.

The researchers have demonstrated theoretically that this can be achieved using a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator, which produces electron bunches that can have a length of a few tens of nanometres. They show that if these ultra-short bunches of high energy electrons pass through a short undulator, they can produce as may photons as a very expensive FEL can produce. Moreover, they have also shown that by producing an electron bunch that has an energy “chirp”, they can ballistically compress the bunch to a very short duration inside the undulator, which provides a unique way of going to even shorter electron bunches and therefore produce even shorter wavelength light.

The research collaboration also involved the University of Manchester (UK), Pulsar Physics (NL) and the STFC ASTeC group at Daresbury Laboratories. The study has received funding from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), to support a project named “Lab in a Bubble”.

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Strathclyde [Oilthigh Shrath Chluaidh] (SCT)) is a public research university located in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1796 as the Andersonian Institute, it is Glasgow’s second-oldest university, having received its royal charter in 1964 as the first technological university in the United Kingdom. Taking its name from the historic Kingdom of Strathclyde, it is Scotland’s third-largest university by number of students, with students and staff from over 100 countries.

The institution was named University of the Year 2012 by Times Higher Education and again in 2019, becoming the first university to receive this award twice. The annual income of the institution for 2019–20 was £334.8 million of which £81.2 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £298.8 million. It is one of the 39 old universities in the UK comprising the distinctive second cluster of elite universities after Oxbridge.

Research

In 2011 the University’s Advanced Forming Research Centre was announced as a leading partner in the first UK-wide Technology Strategy Board Catapult Centre. The Government also announced that the University is to lead the UK-wide EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation.

The University has become the base for the first Fraunhofer Centre to be established in the UK. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Europe’s largest organisation for contract research, is creating the new Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics in collaboration with Strathclyde, for research in sectors including healthcare, security, energy and transport.

Strathclyde was chosen in 2012 as the exclusive European partner university for South Korea’s global research and commercialisation programme – the Global Industry-Academia Cooperation Programme, funded by South Korea’s Ministry of Knowledge and Economics.

In 2012 the University became a key partner in its second UK Catapult Centre. Plans for the Catapult Centre for Offshore Renewable Energy were announced at Strathclyde by Business Secretary Vince Cable. The University has also become a partner in the Industrial Doctorate Centre for Offshore Renewable Energy, which is one of 11 doctoral centres at Strathclyde.

Engineers at the University are leading the €4 million, Europe-wide Stardust project, a research-based training network investigating the removal of space debris and the deflection of asteroids.

Strathclyde has become part of the new ESRC Enterprise Research Centre, a £2.9 million venture generating world-class research to help stimulate growth for small and medium-sized enterprises.

The University has centres in pharmacy, drug delivery and development, micro and ultrasonic engineering, biophotonics and photonics, biomedical engineering, medical devices, new therapies,prosthetics and orthotics, public health history, law, crime and justice and social work. The University is involved in 11 partnerships with other universities through the Scottish Funding Councils’ Research Pooling Programme, covering areas such as engineering, life sciences, energy, marine science and technology, physics, chemistry, computer sciences and economics.

Several Strathclyde staff have been elected to Fellowships in the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London.

From DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) and Stanford University (US) : “A detailed study of nickelate’s magnetism finds a strong kinship with cuprate superconductors”

From DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US)

and

Stanford University (US)

July 8, 2021
Glennda Chui

Nickelate materials give scientists an exciting new window into how unconventional superconductors carry electric current with no loss at relatively high temperatures.

A new study found that nickelate superconductors, like their cousins the cuprates, are antiferromagnetic. Their electron spins – represented by gold arrows here – form a checkerboard pattern, so each down spin is surrounded by up spins and vice versa. The alternating spins cancel each other out, so the material as a whole is not magnetic in the ordinary sense. Researchers at SLAC, Stanford and Diamond Light Source discovered important similarities like this one as well as subtle differences between the two materials. Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Ever since the 1986 discovery that copper oxide materials, or cuprates, could carry electrical current with no loss at unexpectedly high temperatures, scientists have been looking for other unconventional superconductors that could operate even closer to room temperature. This would allow for a host of everyday applications that could transform society by making energy transmission more efficient, for instance.

Nickel oxides, or nickelates, seemed like a promising candidate. They’re based on nickel, which sits next to copper on the periodic table, and the two elements have some common characteristics. It was not unreasonable to think that superconductivity would be one of them.

But it took years of trying before scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University finally created the first nickelate that showed clear signs of superconductivity [Nature].

Now SLAC; Stanford; and Diamond Light Source researchers have made the first measurements of magnetic excitations that spread through the new material like ripples in a pond. The results reveal both important similarities and subtle differences between nickelates and cuprates. The scientists published their results in Science today.

Diamond Light Source, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire U.K.

STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire, UK.

“This is exciting, because it gives us a new angle for exploring how unconventional superconductors work, which is still an open question after 30-plus years of research,” said Haiyu Lu, a Stanford graduate student who did the bulk of the research with Stanford postdoctoral researcher Matteo Rossi and SLAC staff scientist Wei-Sheng Lee.

“Among other things,” he said, “we want to understand the nature of the relationship between cuprates and nickelates: Are they just neighbors, waving hello and going about their separate ways, or more like cousins who share family traits and ways of doing things?”

The results of this study, he said, add to a growing body of evidence that their relationship is a close one.

Spins in a checkerboard

Cuprates and nickelates have similar structures with their atoms arranged in a rigid lattice. Both come in thin, two-dimensional sheets that are layered with other elements, such as rare-earth ions. These thin sheets become superconducting when they’re cooled below a certain temperature and the density of their free-flowing electrons is adjusted in a process known as doping.

The first superconducting nickelate was discovered in 2019 at SLAC and Stanford. Last year, the same SLAC/Stanford team that performed this latest experiment published the first detailed study of the nickelate’s electronic behavior [Nature Materials]. That study established that in undoped nickelate, electrons flow freely in nickel oxide layers, but electrons from the intervening layers also contribute electrons to the flow. This creates a 3D metallic state that’s quite different from what is seen in cuprates, which are insulators when undoped.

Magnetism is also important in superconductivity. It’s created by the spins of a material’s electrons. When they’re all oriented in the same direction, either up or down, the material is magnetic in the sense that it could stick to the door of your fridge.

Cuprates, on the other hand, are antiferromagnetic: Their electron spins form a checkerboard pattern, so each down spin is surrounded by up spins and vice versa. The alternating spins cancel each other out, so the material as a whole is not magnetic in the ordinary sense.

Would nickelate have those same characteristics? To find out, researchers took samples of it to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in the UK for examination with resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, or RIXS. In this technique, scientists scatter X-ray light off a sample of material. This injection of energy creates magnetic excitations – ripples that travel through the material and randomly flip the spins of some of its electrons. RIXS allows scientists to measure very weak excitations that couldn’t be observed otherwise.

Creating new recipes

“What we find is quite interesting,” Lee said. “The data show that nickelate has the same type of antiferromagnetic interaction that cuprates have. It also has a similar magnetic energy, which reflects the strength of the interactions between neighboring spins that keep this magnetic order in place. This implies that the same type of physics is important in both.”

But there are also differences, Rossi noted. Magnetic excitations don’t spread as far in nickelates, and die out more quickly. Doping also affects the two materials differently; the positively charged “holes” it creates are concentrated around nickel atoms in nickelates and around oxygen atoms in cuprates, and this affects how their electrons behave.

As this work continues, Rossi said, the team will test how doping the nickelate in various ways and swapping different rare earth elements into the layers between the nickel oxide sheets affect the material’s superconductivity ­– paving the way, they hope, to discovery of better superconductors.

Lu, Rossi, Lee and six other members of the research team are investigators with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC, which received major funding from the DOE Office of Science. Researchers from the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at Leiden University [Universiteit Leiden] (NL) in the Netherlands also contributed to this work.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and located in Menlo Park, California. It is the site of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a 3.2 kilometer (2-mile) linear accelerator constructed in 1966 and shut down in the 2000s, which could accelerate electrons to energies of 50 GeV.

Today SLAC research centers on a broad program in atomic and solid-state physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine using X-rays from synchrotron radiation and a free-electron laser as well as experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics, astroparticle physics, and cosmology.

Founded in 1962 as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the facility is located on 172 hectares (426 acres) of Stanford University-owned land on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California—just west of the University’s main campus. The main accelerator is 3.2 kilometers (2 mi) long—the longest linear accelerator in the world—and has been operational since 1966.

Research at SLAC has produced three Nobel Prizes in Physics

1976: The charm quark—see J/ψ meson
1990: Quark structure inside protons and neutrons
1995: The tau lepton

SLAC’s meeting facilities also provided a venue for the Homebrew Computer Club and other pioneers of the home computer revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1984 the laboratory was named an ASME National Historic Engineering Landmark and an IEEE Milestone.

SLAC developed and, in December 1991, began hosting the first World Wide Web server outside of Europe.

In the early-to-mid 1990s, the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC) investigated the properties of the Z boson using the Stanford Large Detector.

As of 2005, SLAC employed over 1,000 people, some 150 of whom were physicists with doctorate degrees, and served over 3,000 visiting researchers yearly, operating particle accelerators for high-energy physics and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) for synchrotron light radiation research, which was “indispensable” in the research leading to the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Stanford Professor Roger D. Kornberg.

In October 2008, the Department of Energy announced that the center’s name would be changed to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The reasons given include a better representation of the new direction of the lab and the ability to trademark the laboratory’s name. Stanford University had legally opposed the Department of Energy’s attempt to trademark “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center”.

In March 2009, it was announced that the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory was to receive $68.3 million in Recovery Act Funding to be disbursed by Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

In October 2016, Bits and Watts launched as a collaboration between SLAC and Stanford University to design “better, greener electric grids”. SLAC later pulled out over concerns about an industry partner, the state-owned Chinese electric utility.

Accelerator

The main accelerator was an RF linear accelerator that accelerated electrons and positrons up to 50 GeV. At 3.2 km (2.0 mi) long, the accelerator was the longest linear accelerator in the world, and was claimed to be “the world’s most straight object.” until 2017 when the European x-ray free electron laser opened. The main accelerator is buried 9 m (30 ft) below ground and passes underneath Interstate Highway 280. The above-ground klystron gallery atop the beamline, was the longest building in the United States until the LIGO project’s twin interferometers were completed in 1999. It is easily distinguishable from the air and is marked as a visual waypoint on aeronautical charts.

A portion of the original linear accelerator is now part of the Linac Coherent Light Source [below].

Stanford Linear Collider

The Stanford Linear Collider was a linear accelerator that collided electrons and positrons at SLAC. The center of mass energy was about 90 GeV, equal to the mass of the Z boson, which the accelerator was designed to study. Grad student Barrett D. Milliken discovered the first Z event on 12 April 1989 while poring over the previous day’s computer data from the Mark II detector. The bulk of the data was collected by the SLAC Large Detector, which came online in 1991. Although largely overshadowed by the Large Electron–Positron Collider at CERN, which began running in 1989, the highly polarized electron beam at SLC (close to 80%) made certain unique measurements possible, such as parity violation in Z Boson-b quark coupling.

European Organization for Nuclear Research [Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire](CH) LEP Collider

Presently no beam enters the south and north arcs in the machine, which leads to the Final Focus, therefore this section is mothballed to run beam into the PEP2 section from the beam switchyard.

The SLAC Large Detector (SLD) was the main detector for the Stanford Linear Collider. It was designed primarily to detect Z bosons produced by the accelerator’s electron-positron collisions. Built in 1991, the SLD operated from 1992 to 1998.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)Large Detector

PEP

PEP (Positron-Electron Project) began operation in 1980, with center-of-mass energies up to 29 GeV. At its apex, PEP had five large particle detectors in operation, as well as a sixth smaller detector. About 300 researchers made used of PEP. PEP stopped operating in 1990, and PEP-II began construction in 1994.

PEP-II

From 1999 to 2008, the main purpose of the linear accelerator was to inject electrons and positrons into the PEP-II accelerator, an electron-positron collider with a pair of storage rings 2.2 km (1.4 mi) in circumference. PEP-II was host to the BaBar experiment, one of the so-called B-Factory experiments studying charge-parity symmetry.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) BaBar

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)/SSRL

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

SLAC plays a primary role in the mission and operation of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched in August 2008. The principal scientific objectives of this mission are:

To understand the mechanisms of particle acceleration in AGNs, pulsars, and SNRs.
To resolve the gamma-ray sky: unidentified sources and diffuse emission.
To determine the high-energy behavior of gamma-ray bursts and transients.
To probe dark matter and fundamental physics.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)/Fermi Large Area Telescope

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)/Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope.

KIPAC

http://kipac.stanford.edu/kipac/campus

The Stanford PULSE Institute (PULSE) is a Stanford Independent Laboratory located in the Central Laboratory at SLAC. PULSE was created by Stanford in 2005 to help Stanford faculty and SLAC scientists develop ultrafast x-ray research at LCLS.

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS)[below] is a free electron laser facility located at SLAC. The LCLS is partially a reconstruction of the last 1/3 of the original linear accelerator at SLAC, and can deliver extremely intense x-ray radiation for research in a number of areas. It achieved first lasing in April 2009.

The laser produces hard X-rays, 10^9 times the relative brightness of traditional synchrotron sources and is the most powerful x-ray source in the world. LCLS enables a variety of new experiments and provides enhancements for existing experimental methods. Often, x-rays are used to take “snapshots” of objects at the atomic level before obliterating samples. The laser’s wavelength, ranging from 6.2 to 0.13 nm (200 to 9500 electron volts (eV)) is similar to the width of an atom, providing extremely detailed information that was previously unattainable. Additionally, the laser is capable of capturing images with a “shutter speed” measured in femtoseconds, or million-billionths of a second, necessary because the intensity of the beam is often high enough so that the sample explodes on the femtosecond timescale.

The LCLS-II [below] project is to provide a major upgrade to LCLS by adding two new X-ray laser beams. The new system will utilize the 500 m (1,600 ft) of existing tunnel to add a new superconducting accelerator at 4 GeV and two new sets of undulators that will increase the available energy range of LCLS. The advancement from the discoveries using this new capabilities may include new drugs, next-generation computers, and new materials.

FACET

In 2012, the first two-thirds (~2 km) of the original SLAC LINAC were recommissioned for a new user facility, the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET). This facility was capable of delivering 20 GeV, 3 nC electron (and positron) beams with short bunch lengths and small spot sizes, ideal for beam-driven plasma acceleration studies. The facility ended operations in 2016 for the constructions of LCLS-II which will occupy the first third of the SLAC LINAC. The FACET-II project will re-establish electron and positron beams in the middle third of the LINAC for the continuation of beam-driven plasma acceleration studies in 2019.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) FACET

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) FACET-II upgrading its Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) – a test bed for new technologies that could revolutionize the way we build particle accelerators.

The Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA) is a 60-120 MeV high-brightness electron beam linear accelerator used for experiments on advanced beam manipulation and acceleration techniques. It is located at SLAC’s end station B

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA)

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory campus

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)/LCLS

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)/LCLS II projected view

[caption id="attachment_165469" align="alignnone" width="632"] Magnets called undulators stretch roughly 100 meters down a tunnel at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with one side (right) producing hard x-rays and the other soft x-rays.Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

SSRL and LCLS are DOE Office of Science user facilities.

Stanford University (US)

Leland and Jane Stanford founded the University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.

As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.

Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.

Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)(originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.

Land

Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.

Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.

On the founding grant:

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.

Off the founding grant:

Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.

Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.

The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.

China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University(CN) (KIAA-PKU).

Administration and organization

Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.[83] A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).

The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.

As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.

Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Endowment and donations

The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University(US), the University of Texas System(US), and Yale University(US) had larger endowments than Stanford.

In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Research centers and institutes

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with UC Berkeley(US) and UC San Francisco(US), Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

Discoveries and innovation

Natural sciences

Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.

Computer and applied sciences

ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.

Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.

Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.

Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.

RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and UC Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.

Businesses and entrepreneurship

Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.

The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:

Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.[163]
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).

Student body

Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.

Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.

As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.

Athletics

As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.

Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Traditions

The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.

Award laureates and scholars

Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:

19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

From DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (US) : “Lighting Up Ultrafast Magnetism in a Metal Oxide”

From DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (US)

June 7, 2021

Ariana Manglaviti
amanglaviti@bnl.gov
(631) 344-2347

Peter Genzer
genzer@bnl.gov
(631) 344-3174

Understanding how magnetic correlations change over very short timescales could be harnessed to control magnetism for applications including data storage and superconductivity.

Scientists struck a crystalline material with ultrafast pulses of laser light and then used x-rays to probe how its magnetic order changes. Image credit: Cameron Dashwood, University College London (UK).

What happens when very short pulses of laser light strike a magnetic material? A large international collaboration led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory set out to answer this very question. As they just reported in the PNAS, the laser suppressed magnetic order across the entire material for several picoseconds, or trillionths of a second. Understanding how magnetic correlations change on ultrafast timescales is the first step in being able to control magnetism in application-oriented ways. For example, with such control, we may be able to more quickly write data to memory devices or enhance superconductivity (the phenomenon in which a material conducts electricity without energy loss), which often competes with other states like magnetism.

The material studied was strontium iridium oxide (Sr3Ir2O7), an antiferromagnet with a bilayer crystal structure and a large magnetic anisotropy. In an antiferromagnet, the magnetic moments, or electron spins, align in opposite directions to neighboring spins. Anisotropy means the spins need to pay an energetic cost to rotate in any random direction; they really want to sit pointing upwards or downwards in the crystal structure. The X-ray Scattering Group of Brookhaven Lab’s Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science (CMPMS) Division has previously studied this material (and a single-layer sister compound, Sr2IrO4), so they entered this study with a good understanding of its equilibrium state.

“The very short laser pulses disturb the system, destroying its magnetic order,” said first author Daniel Mazzone, former group member and now an instrument scientist at the Continuous Angle Multiple Energy Analysis (CAMEA) spectrometer at the Paul Scherrer Institute [Paul Scherrer Institut](PSI) (CH). “In this study, we were interested in seeing how the system relaxes back to its normal state. We knew the relaxation occurs on a very fast timescale, and to take a picture of something that moves very fast, we need very short pulses of illumination. With an x-ray free-electron laser source, we can generate pulses short enough to see the movement of atoms and molecules. Such sources only exist at five places around the world—in the United States, Japan, Korea, Germany, and Switzerland.”

A schematic of the resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) and resonant elastic x-ray scattering (REXS) setups. The square in the middle represents the sample, which is struck with a laser (pump) and then x-rays (probe) almost immediately after. For the RIXS experiments, the team built a motorized x-ray spectrometer (copper-colored circle) to see how spins are behaving locally.

In this study, the team ran experiments at two of the five facilities. At the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free-electron Laser (SACLA) in Japan, they conducted time-resolved resonant elastic x-ray scattering (tr-REXS).

SACLA Free-Electron Laser Riken [理研](JP) Japan

At the x-ray pump-probe instrument of the Linac Coherent Light Source—a DOE Office of Science User Facility at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory—the scientists performed time-resolved resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (tr-RIXS).

SLAC LCLS

In both scattering techniques, x-rays (probe) strike the material almost immediately after the laser pulse (pump). By measuring the energy and angle of scattered particles of light (photons), scientists can determine the material’s electronic structure and thus magnetic configuration. In this case, the x-ray energy was tuned to be sensitive to the electrons around iridium atoms, which drive magnetism in this material. While tr-REXS can reveal the degree of long-range magnetic order, tr-RIXS can provide a picture of local magnetic interactions.

“In order to observe the detailed behavior of spins, we need to measure the energy change of the x-rays with very high precision,” explained co-corresponding author Mark Dean, a physicist in the CMPMS Division X-ray Scattering Group. “To do so, we built and installed a motorized x-ray spectrometer at SLAC.”

Their data revealed how magnetic interactions are suppressed not just locally but everywhere. This suppression persists for picoseconds before the magnetic order returns to its initial antiferromagnetic state.

“The bilayer system does not have energetically low-cost ways to deform the magnetic state,” explained Dean. “It gets stuck in this bottleneck where the magnetism is out of equilibrium and is not recovering, at least not as quickly as in the monolayer system.”

“For most applications, such as data storage, you want fast magnetic switching,” added Mazzone. “Our research suggests systems where spins can point whichever direction are better for manipulating magnetism.”

Next, the team plans to look at related materials and hopes to manipulate magnetism in more targeted ways—for example, changing how strongly two neighboring spins “talk to” each other.

“If we can change the distance between two spins and see how that affects their interaction, that would be really cool,” said Mazzone. “With an understanding of how magnetism evolves, we could tweak it, maybe generating new states.”

The complexity of setting up and operating the spectrometer required a large collaboration including former and current Brookhaven X-ray Scattering Group members Daniel Mazzone, Derek Meyers, Yue Cao, Jiaqi Lin, Vivek Thampy, Hu Miao, Tadesse Assefa, John Hill, Ian Robinson, and Xuerong Liu. James Vale, Cameron Dashwood, and Desmond McMorrow of University College London; Diego Casa and Jungho Kim of DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (US); laser experts Alan Johnson and Roman Mankowsky of the Paul Scherrer Institut, Michael Först of the MPG Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter [MPG Institut für Struktur und Dynamik der Materie] (DE), and Simon Wall of Aarhus University [Aarhus Universitet] (DK); and the beamline teams from SLAC and SACLA were also crucial to the success of the experiments. Theoretical collaborations included Robert Konik of Brookhaven and Neil Robinson and Andrew James, both formerly at Brookhaven.

The other collaborating institutions are Oklahoma State University (US), Chinese Academy of Sciences [中国科学院](CN), The Open University (UK), University of Amsterdam [Universiteit van Amsterdam] (NL), ShanghaiTech University [上海科技大学] (CN), Riken [理研](JP), Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology [Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnología de Barcelona](ES), and University of Tennessee (US).

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the DOE(US) Office of Science, DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (US) conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. The Laboratory’s almost 3,000 scientists, engineers, and support staff are joined each year by more than 5,000 visiting researchers from around the world. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University(US), the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle(US), a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

Research at BNL specializes in nuclear and high energy physics, energy science and technology, environmental and bioscience, nanoscience and national security. The 5,300 acre campus contains several large research facilities, including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [below] and National Synchrotron Light Source II [below]. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work conducted at Brookhaven lab.

BNL is staffed by approximately 2,750 scientists, engineers, technicians, and support personnel, and hosts 4,000 guest investigators every year. The laboratory has its own police station, fire department, and ZIP code (11973). In total, the lab spans a 5,265-acre (21 km^2) area that is mostly coterminous with the hamlet of Upton, New York. BNL is served by a rail spur operated as-needed by the New York and Atlantic Railway. Co-located with the laboratory is the Upton, New York, forecast office of the National Weather Service.

Major programs

Although originally conceived as a nuclear research facility, Brookhaven Lab’s mission has greatly expanded. Its foci are now:

Nuclear and high-energy physics
Physics and chemistry of materials
Environmental and climate research
Nanomaterials
Energy research
Nonproliferation
Structural biology
Accelerator physics

Operation

Brookhaven National Lab was originally owned by the Atomic Energy Commission(US) and is now owned by that agency’s successor, the United States Department of Energy (DOE). DOE subcontracts the research and operation to universities and research organizations. It is currently operated by Brookhaven Science Associates LLC, which is an equal partnership of Stony Brook University(US) and Battelle Memorial Institute(US). From 1947 to 1998, it was operated by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) (US), but AUI lost its contract in the wake of two incidents: a 1994 fire at the facility’s high-beam flux reactor that exposed several workers to radiation and reports in 1997 of a tritium leak into the groundwater of the Long Island Central Pine Barrens on which the facility sits.

Foundations

Following World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission was created to support government-sponsored peacetime research on atomic energy. The effort to build a nuclear reactor in the American northeast was fostered largely by physicists Isidor Isaac Rabi and Norman Foster Ramsey Jr., who during the war witnessed many of their colleagues at Columbia University leave for new remote research sites following the departure of the Manhattan Project from its campus. Their effort to house this reactor near New York City was rivalled by a similar effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) to have a facility near Boston, Massachusettes(US). Involvement was quickly solicited from representatives of northeastern universities to the south and west of New York City such that this city would be at their geographic center. In March 1946 a nonprofit corporation was established that consisted of representatives from nine major research universities — Columbia University(US), Cornell University(US), Harvard University(US), Johns Hopkins University(US), Massachusetts Institute of Technology(US), Princeton University(US), University of Pennsylvania(US), University of Rochester(US), and Yale University(US).

Out of 17 considered sites in the Boston-Washington corridor, Camp Upton on Long Island was eventually chosen as the most suitable in consideration of space, transportation, and availability. The camp had been a training center from the US Army during both World War I and World War II. After the latter war, Camp Upton was deemed no longer necessary and became available for reuse. A plan was conceived to convert the military camp into a research facility.

On March 21, 1947, the Camp Upton site was officially transferred from the U.S. War Department to the new U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), predecessor to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Research and facilities

Reactor history

In 1947 construction began on the first nuclear reactor at Brookhaven, the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor. This reactor, which opened in 1950, was the first reactor to be constructed in the United States after World War II. The High Flux Beam Reactor operated from 1965 to 1999. In 1959 Brookhaven built the first US reactor specifically tailored to medical research, the Brookhaven Medical Research Reactor, which operated until 2000.

Accelerator history

In 1952 Brookhaven began using its first particle accelerator, the Cosmotron. At the time the Cosmotron was the world’s highest energy accelerator, being the first to impart more than 1 GeV of energy to a particle.

BNL Cosmotron 1952-1966

The Cosmotron was retired in 1966, after it was superseded in 1960 by the new Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS).

BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS)

The AGS was used in research that resulted in 3 Nobel prizes, including the discovery of the muon neutrino, the charm quark, and CP violation.

In 1970 in BNL started the ISABELLE project to develop and build two proton intersecting storage rings.

The groundbreaking for the project was in October 1978. In 1981, with the tunnel for the accelerator already excavated, problems with the superconducting magnets needed for the ISABELLE accelerator brought the project to a halt, and the project was eventually cancelled in 1983.

The National Synchrotron Light Source (US) operated from 1982 to 2014 and was involved with two Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. It has since been replaced by the National Synchrotron Light Source II (US) [below].

BNL National Synchrotron Light Source (US).

After ISABELLE’S cancellation, physicist at BNL proposed that the excavated tunnel and parts of the magnet assembly be used in another accelerator. In 1984 the first proposal for the accelerator now known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)[below] was put forward. The construction got funded in 1991 and RHIC has been operational since 2000. One of the world’s only two operating heavy-ion colliders, RHIC is as of 2010 the second-highest-energy collider after the Large Hadron Collider(CH). RHIC is housed in a tunnel 2.4 miles (3.9 km) long and is visible from space.

On January 9, 2020, It was announced by Paul Dabbar, undersecretary of the US Department of Energy Office of Science, that the BNL eRHIC design has been selected over the conceptual design put forward by DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility [Jlab] (US) as the future Electron–ion collider (EIC) in the United States.

Brookhaven Lab Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) (US) to be built inside the tunnel that currently houses the RHIC.

In addition to the site selection, it was announced that the BNL EIC had acquired CD-0 (mission need) from the Department of Energy. BNL’s eRHIC design proposes upgrading the existing Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which collides beams light to heavy ions including polarized protons, with a polarized electron facility, to be housed in the same tunnel.

Other discoveries

In 1958, Brookhaven scientists created one of the world’s first video games, Tennis for Two. In 1968 Brookhaven scientists patented Maglev, a transportation technology that utilizes magnetic levitation.

Major facilities

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which was designed to research quark–gluon plasma and the sources of proton spin. Until 2009 it was the world’s most powerful heavy ion collider. It is the only collider of spin-polarized protons.
Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), used for the study of nanoscale materials.
BNL National Synchrotron Light Source II(US), Brookhaven’s newest user facility, opened in 2015 to replace the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), which had operated for 30 years.[19] NSLS was involved in the work that won the 2003 and 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, a particle accelerator that was used in three of the lab’s Nobel prizes.
Accelerator Test Facility, generates, accelerates and monitors particle beams.
Tandem Van de Graaff, once the world’s largest electrostatic accelerator.
Computational Science resources, including access to a massively parallel Blue Gene series supercomputer that is among the fastest in the world for scientific research, run jointly by Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University.
Interdisciplinary Science Building, with unique laboratories for studying high-temperature superconductors and other materials important for addressing energy challenges.
NASA Space Radiation Laboratory, where scientists use beams of ions to simulate cosmic rays and assess the risks of space radiation to human space travelers and equipment.

Off-site contributions

It is a contributing partner to ATLAS experiment, one of the four detectors located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

European Organization for Nuclear Research (Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire)(EU) [CERN] map

Iconic view of the European Organization for Nuclear Research [Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire](CH)CERN ATLAS detector

It is currently operating at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

Brookhaven was also responsible for the design of the SNS accumulator ring in partnership with Spallation Neutron Source at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US), Tennessee.

DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory(US) Spallation Neutron Source annotated.

Brookhaven plays a role in a range of neutrino research projects around the world, including the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment (CN) nuclear power plant, approximately 52 kilometers northeast of Hong Kong and 45 kilometers east of Shenzhen, China.

Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment (CN) nuclear power plant, approximately 52 kilometers northeast of Hong Kong and 45 kilometers east of Shenzhen, China ,

FNAL DUNE LBNF (US) from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota, USA

Brookhaven Campus

BNL Center for Functional Nanomaterials.

BNL National Synchrotron Light Source II(US).

BNL NSLS II (US).

BNL Relative Heavy Ion Collider (US) Campus.

BNL/RHIC Star Detector.

BNL/RHIC Phenix detector.

From Cornell Chronicle (US) : “Nanoscale defects could boost energy storage materials”

From Cornell Chronicle (US)

April 30, 2021
David Nutt
cunews@cornell.edu

Some imperfections pay big dividends.

A Cornell-led collaboration used X-ray nanoimaging to gain an unprecedented view into solid-state electrolytes, revealing previously undetected crystal defects and dislocations that may now be leveraged to create superior energy storage materials.

The group’s paper is published April 29 in Nano Letters, a publication of the American Chemical Society. The paper’s lead author is doctoral student Yifei Sun.

The Singer Group is leveraging defects and dislocations in solid-state electrolytes to create superior energy storage materials. American Chemical Society/Provided.

For a half-century, materials scientists have been investigating the effects of tiny defects in metals. The evolution of imaging tools has now created opportunities for exploring similar phenomena in other materials, most notably those used for energy storage.

A group led by Andrej Singer, assistant professor and David Croll Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, uses synchrotron radiation to uncover atomic-scale defects in battery materials that conventional approaches, such as electron microscopy, have failed to find.

The Singer Group is particularly interested in solid-state electrolytes because they could potentially be used to replace the liquid and polymer electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries. One of the major drawbacks of liquid electrolytes is they are susceptible to the formation of spiky dendrites between the anode and cathode, which short out the battery or, even worse, cause it to explode.

Solid-state electrolytes have the virtue of not being flammable, but they present challenges of their own. They don’t conduct lithium ions as strongly or quickly as fluids, and maintaining contact between the anode and cathode can be difficult. Solid-state electrolytes also need to be extremely thin; otherwise, the battery would be too bulky and any gain in capacity would be negated.

The one thing that could make solid-state electrolytes viable? Tiny defects, Singer said.

“These defects might facilitate ionic diffusion, so they might allow the ions to go faster. That’s something that’s known to happen in metals,” he said. “Also like in metals, having defects is better in terms of preventing fracture. So they might make the material less prone to breaking.”

Singer’s group collaborated with Nikolaos Bouklas, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and a co-author of the paper, who helped them understand how defects and dislocations might impact the mechanical properties of solid-state electrolytes.

The Cornell team then partnered with researchers at Virginia Tech (US) – led by Feng Lin, the paper’s co-senior author – who synthesized the sample: a garnet crystal structure, lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide (LLZO), with various concentrations of aluminum added in a process called doping.

Using the Advanced Photon Source (US) at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, they employed a technique called Bragg Coherent Diffractive Imaging in which a pure, columnated X-ray beam is focused – much like a laser pointer – on a single micron-sized grain of LLZO. Electrolytes consist of millions of these grains.

ANL Advanced Photon Source.

The beam created a 3D image that ultimately revealed the material’s morphology and atomic displacements.

“These electrolytes were assumed to be perfect crystals,” Sun said. “But what we find are defects such as dislocations and grain boundaries that haven’t been reported before. Without our 3D imaging, which is extremely sensitive to defects, it would be likely impossible to see those dislocations because the dislocation density is so low.”

The researchers now plan to conduct a study that measures how the defects impact the performance of solid-state electrolytes in an actual battery.

“Now that we know exactly what we’re looking for, we want to find these defects and look at them as we operate the battery,” Singer said. “We are still far away from it, but we may be at the beginning of a new development where we can design these defects on purpose to make better energy storage materials.”

Co-authors include postdoctoral fellow Oleg Gorobstov and doctoral students Daniel Weinstock and Ryan Bouck, from the Singer lab; and researchers at Virginia Tech and Argonne National Laboratory.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (US).

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University (US) represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.
Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University(US) is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute(US) in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the State University of New York(US) (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University(US) laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States. Cornell is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation(US), accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech(US) engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building. Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico(US) until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico](US).

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As an NSF center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer. In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Eniginnering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation. During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory(US), which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States. Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.

As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.