SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, founded in 1962 and sponsored by the Department of Energy while administered by Stanford University. It is home to the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a 3.2 kilometer linear accelerator built in 1966 that could accelerate electrons to energies of 20 GeV and was later upgraded to 50 GeV. Today SLAC's research spans atomic and solid state physics, chemistry, biology and medicine using synchrotron radiation X-rays and a free electron laser, alongside experimental and theoretical work in particle physics, accelerator physics, astroparticle physics and cosmology, under the programmatic direction of the Department of Energy's Office of Science.