SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Next for neutrinos? SLAC is involved in several experiments that aim to shine light on the elusive ghostly particles. Neutrinos could link to cosmic evolution, dark matter & matter’s dominance over antimatter in the universe! 70 years since discovery & still so much to learn.

Topping out! 🏗️ A final beam completes the structural frame of our Large Scale Collaboration Center! It will serve as a collaboration hub for science & computational science staff, providing flexible workspaces & advanced tools that help us see data and discoveries in new ways.

Bridging history #DYK that SLAC’s first chief civil engineer, Bob Gould, also worked on the construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge? Bridge construction began #OTD in 1933, while construction of what is now known as SLAC began in 1962.

A little piece of SLAC history is now in D.C. Featured in the @ENERGY booth at the Great American State Fair, this rate-meter gauge was installed in our SPEAR ring in 1974 and provided a visual display of the rate at which new quarks were created in our MARK II detector.

@sophieblue210 Past the lambda point. We cool the accelerator to minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit – or 2 kelvins – a temperature at which it becomes superconducting and can boost electrons to high energies with nearly zero energy lost in the process.

@SLAClab colder than space is cute but are you actually hitting the lambda point or just quoting the dewar spec

Helium cools the world's most powerful X-ray laser to temps colder than outer space & puts it on the path to generating X-rays like we have never achieved before. A new helium distribution line is part of the high-energy upgrade coming to our LCLS: stanford.io/4y7wrkr

Happy 250th Birthday USA! 🇺🇸 We are proud to be a U.S. Department of @ENERGY National Lab, leading scientific innovation in the United States and tackling the critical scientific challenges of our time.

@mrninninnin @VRubinObs #ICYMI A new image was just released this week! It is a 1.7-gigapixel image of a field of stars in the constellation Lupus, and we call it "Ocean of Stars". You can now explore it in depth in @VRubinObs's Skyviewer: skyviewer.app/explorer

What do we mean when we say NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory will scan the sky? This visualization shows what a typical week of the 10-year survey looks like. The survey runs via a smart algorithm called a scheduler that dynamically determines where Rubin points next.

Remember when we superheated solid gold 14x past its melting point (and it stayed solid)? Well we’ve done it again. This time measuring how fast the ions in gold heat up. Spoiler alert: it takes mere picoseconds (trillionths of a second)!

June gloom was doomed 🌤️ Too much bright & stellar science happening here. From starting the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the universe ever, to pioneering AI research through @ENERGY's #GenesisMission. The latest in our monthly newsletter: bit.ly/3SEL7av

@is_OwenLewis @VRubinObs 😊

@VRubinObs @SLAClab That is one big camera.

It's #NationalCameraDay, and we've got a great one, built by @SLAClab 😎 Meet NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera 📸 It captures an area of sky 45 times the size of the full Moon — that huge view is what'll enable Rubin to capture the entire visible sky every few nights!

@VRubinObs 🤩🤩🤩

The start of a new survey of the Universe? That deserves a new view of the cosmos 🌌 Meet the Ocean of Stars, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's newest wide-field image. 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/gallery/image-…

@DJSnM @AsteroidDay Happy #AsteroidDay to you too!

Vera Rubin finally begins operation, this will lead to a huge increase in the number of asteroids discovered... starting on @AsteroidDay

Stars, camera, action! 🌌 📸 🎬 We're celebrating the official start of @VRubinObs's ultra-high-definition 10-year time-lapse of the universe, which will be the most comprehensive cinematic record to date! #CaptureTheCosmos with us: stanford.io/4wh1Pev

The moment we've all been waiting for is finally here… On June 29, 2026, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory officially began the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)! 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/action-ru…

@dslsynth @VRubinObs Keep in mind that the machining and measuring are done at room temperature, so we needed to calculate for the change in dimensions when we operate the sensors at -100C!

@dslsynth @VRubinObs The 201 sensors and the "grid" which holds them have kinematic features which are carefully machined into them. The critical dimension is in and out of the plane of the sensors. We verified that all 75 kinematic features on the grid are the same height to within 2.5 microns.

It’s #NationalCameraDay – commemorating the invention of the camera and the art of photography! 📷 SLAC built the world’s largest digital camera, and we can’t wait to see how it will #CaptureTheCosmos with @VRubinObs.

@VRubinObs We got you! 📸🫶