History
Founded in 1962 as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the facility is located on 426 acres (1.72 square kilometers) 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 2 miles 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 a 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 employs over 1,000 people, some 150 of which are physicists with doctorate degrees, and serves 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.
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".
Read more about this topic: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
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