News

In collaboration with the HEDS division, a Stanford team is exploring how new ultra-precise capsules could improve fusion reactors and other energy systems.  

The team developed a platform that uses powerful X-rays from the lab’s LCLS X-ray laser to resolve for the first time the evolution of instabilities in high-density plasmas. 

When Daniella Fenster and her Global Sustainability Challenge teammates started looking for ideas for a project last year, they kept returning to news reports of people going without power for days or weeks after floods. Stories from Hong Kong, Jamaica, India, and across the United States inspired them to consider how they could improve people’s lives in the aftermath of a deluge.

Join us for a special talk with Helen Quinn - a pioneering particle physicist and former Stanford professor - as she shares her journey through physics and discovery. Helen Quinn reflects on her experience as a woman foraging a path in physics and learn how she helped reshape our understanding of the universe.

Researchers hoped to clarify the boundaries between different types of superionic water – the hot, black ice believed to exist at the core of giant ice planets. Instead, they found multiple atomic stacking patterns coexisting in overlapping configurations never seen before in this phase of water.

In its early lifetime, Earth likely went through cycles of compression and decompression, buckling and eventually rebounding under the violent young solar system’s bombardment of asteroids and comets. Though we would never want to go back to this epoch, Zhang et al. have recreated similar conditions in a laboratory to help study our home’s history.

With a new method that could be extended to study Earth’s core and nuclear fusion, they identify and explain jumps in the electrical conductivity of aluminum under extreme conditions.

  Students from the HEDS division joined SLAC's Holiday Social, recreating the HEDS division in gingerbread form as part of a SLAC-wide competition.