What is SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory? The numbers tell the tale.

SLAC began in 1962 with 200 employees.

Nearly 1,700 people now work on staff plus 200 postdoctoral researchers and graduate students.

3,400 scientists from around the world use our cutting-edge facilities each year.

1,000-plus scientific papers are published each year based on research at SLAC.

6 scientists have been awarded Nobel prizes for research at SLAC that discovered 2 fundamental particles, proved protons are made of quarks and showed how DNA directs protein manufacturing in cells.

Our employees hail from 50 countries.

150 buildings sit on our 426-acre site on the Stanford campus.

At 3,073.72 meters (1.9 miles) long, our linear accelerator is one of the longest buildings on Earth.

Electrons zip down that linear accelerator at 669,600,000 mph – 99.9999999 percent of the speed of light.

275 universities make use of our resources, and 55 companies use our X-ray facilities for research aimed at developing medicines and other products.

SLACBy the Numbers

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory 2575 Sand Hill Road Menlo Park, CA 94025–7015

slac.stanford.edu

Above: Replica of SLAC’s Paleoparadoxia fossil. Below: Depiction of the world’s biggest digital camera, being designed by SLAC for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. (Image by Todd Mason, Mason Productions Inc./LSST Corporation)

Right: The interior of a chamber at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source that was set up to create and measure “hot dense matter,” an extreme form of matter existing at 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit. (Photo courtesy University of Oxford/Sam Vinko)

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SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science

SLAC works with Stanford in 4 research centers: Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, Stanford PULSE Institute and SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis.

Our X-ray laser zaps samples with pulses a few millionths of a billionth of a second long.

A 3.2-billion-pixel camera we’re designing for the world’s deepest sky survey will shoot the equivalent of 800,000 8-megapixel digital camera images per night.

3.6-million-degree-F matter created in our labs mimics extreme conditions in the hearts of stars and planets.

SLAC managed construction of the main instrument for a space telescope that’s discovered more than 120 pulsars since its launch in 2008.

The 1st website in North America was at SLAC, designed to help physicists share their research results.

SLAC’s 1st scientific discovery was a fossil: Paleoparadoxia, found in 1964 during excavation for the linear accelerator. It lived 14 million years ago and resembled a hippopotamus.

In 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club began meeting in the SLAC auditorium. This Silicon Valley grassroots group helped spark the personal computing revolution.

We’re 50 years old, and counting!