DOE Lab Seeks Science Life Partners

If researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory were to post a personal ad, it might read a little something like this: Instrumentation scientists seek partners who appreciate precision, reliability and occasionally billion-dollar commitments. Must enjoy solving impossible problems, operating under extreme conditions and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge. Bonus points if your interests include national security, particle accelerators or building technology nobody notices until it changes everything.

SLAC, formerly known as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory, began in 1962 with the construction of a 2-mile-long electron accelerator for particle physics research. Today, it is known for a broad range of research, leading large-scale science projects and inviting scientists around the world to use its X-rays, lasers and electron beams for groundbreaking experiments. 

“We develop cross-cutting new technologies for the lab, for the Department of Energy (DOE) and for the nation. We are the stewards of two capabilities that are needed by SLAC and the DOE and the nation in order to enable that new scientific discovery. So, these are capabilities that must be present in order to develop new technologies so that we can execute our mission,” Lisa Bonetti, associate lab director for SLAC’s Technology Innovation Directorate (TID), explained during a recent SIGNAL Media interview.

Basically, SLAC provides instruments that allow people to see things they couldn’t see otherwise, she added. “Accelerators, X-ray sources, detectors, cameras, readout electronics—that type of thing.”

The Technology Innovation Directorate’s scientists and engineers research and develop technology for nearly every area of SLAC science—whether it’s helping develop the next-generation particle accelerator or enabling powerful data-crunching computational infrastructure to further the lab’s scientific mission, according to a SLAC article. The directorate specializes in developing instruments to measure scientific results, scientific computing systems, radio frequency accelerator research and a wide array of applications, including communication, imaging neuroscience, particle physics and quantum information science.

“A lot of the work that we do is extreme environment instrumentation and hardware. So it’s things that can survive high radiation, very low temperatures like cryogenic conditions, high electric field, high data rate. And it’s kind of the same envelope that both defense and space electronics live [in],” Bonetti offered. 

Mark Kemp, the TID’s deputy associate lab director, added during the same Microsoft Teams interview that many of the technologies invented at SLAC have been used at other scientific facilities. “Historically at SLAC, we created many of the instruments and many of the accelerators and high-power sources were invented at SLAC that are used at a lot of these facilities,” he said. 

Both Bonetti and Kemp expressed interest in wooing new sponsors or partners from the national security and defense arena. “So, the challenge is really ensuring that there’s adequate resources, not just to sustain, but to grow these capabilities in a way that matters for SLAC, DOE and the nation, and really deciding what facilities are key for enabling technologies like high-power RF test facilities, things that are really not commercially available but are critically needed to sustain and grow these capabilities,” Bonetti said. “And then how do we weave in new sponsors in a way that’s complementary and benefits, in a mutual way, this effort?”

Kemp suggested that SLAC’s science-enabling technologies can serve the defense agencies and intelligence community as well. “These tools that are developed for discovery sciences purposes we’re finding have very good traction elsewhere throughout society, be it energy and the environment, be it medical applications, also defense as well,” Kemp said.

He cited as one example the Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator, a research facility that accelerates particles to high collision energies to create exotic new states of matter. Earlier this year, undergraduate students from Harvey Mudd College used NLCTA’s electron beam to test a detector they designed to measure the shape of electron beams that produce radioisotopes for cancer treatment.

“One of the common threads that we see is how we can reutilize our facilities in new and different ways. We have one in particular called the Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator, which is NLCTA. That’s a great example of something that was created for discovery science, but we can do things such as nondestructive evaluation,” Kemp said. We can show new concepts. Our partners that could be in defense can come in, test out some of their concepts in this user facility.” 

SLAC personnel have danced with Department of Defense (DOD) researchers before. For example, Kemp pointed to three Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency programs the lab currently supports. They include:

Advanced Sources for Single-event Effects Radiation Testing (ASSERT) program, which is designed to create new laboratory-scale sources that may change the way radiation-hardened microelectronics are designed. 

Gamma Ray Inspection Technology (GRIT), which seeks transformational approaches to achieving high-intensity, tunable and narrow-bandwidth gamma ray production, but in a compact form factor suitable for transporting the source to where the capability is needed. 

Intense and Compact Neutron Sources (ICONS) aimed at achieving highly portable, intense neutron sources to enable deployable, high-resolution neutron and X-ray imaging for DOD applications such as non-destructive evaluation, detection of explosives and special nuclear materials, and forensics.

Still, Kemp suggested SLAC may not be an obvious choice for a DOD partnership, at least not at first blush. “I think if you ask people around the defense complex about SLAC or about the DOE, many actually would be unaware about the great capabilities that we have here, particularly in the area of high-power radio frequency. And some of our early adoptive partners, they’ve been overwhelmed with a lot of the capability that’s here and can be reused for their application,” he said. 

Bonetti described instrumentation as an area of science that isn’t always appreciated. “Developing the instrumentation to be able to talk to, to be able to understand that thing that you might have modeled and actually fabricated is very important and in some ways underappreciated,” she said. 

SLAC is known in part for its Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a free-electron laser facility that boasted the brightest and fastest X-ray pulses ever made to provide unprecedented details of the atomic world, even before beginning a major upgrade to LCLS II to greatly increase power and capacity. It can generate over 8,000 times more light pulses per second than LCLS and produce an almost continuous X-ray beam that, on average, will be 10,000 times brighter. These unrivaled capabilities will help researchers address a number of grand challenges in science by capturing detailed snapshots of rapid processes that are beyond the reach of other light sources, according to a SLAC video.

With LCLS II producing such vast amounts of data, the SLAC team had to create innovative ways to handle that data, including some early artificial intelligence (AI) adoption. “First of all, AI is not new to SLAC. We have decades of experience really in that realm. What’s commercially available is new and evolving, but we have had to implement things like AI in order to make our data manageable,” Bonetti reported. “Wherever we could implement data reduction in the data pipeline—moving decisions further and further upstream—we benefit. As LCLS II was upgraded to data rates that were unprecedented, we had to change our techniques so that we’re looking at the good data without having to chew through the junk.”

One of those changes, she added, included “putting the decision-making on the hardware, on the detector itself, where we’re making decisions earlier before the data even gets passed down to the point where it’s analyzed. SLAC researchers have also used AI for smart instrumentation, allowing researchers to maximize their use of scarce “beam time” in the accelerator. 

SLAC is in the process of establishing a formal Technology Innovation Council to help identify challenges and establish priorities. The charter has been written and approved, and the council should be in place by the end of the calendar year. “We have folks from across the lab who have visibility into what the next thing is that can help inform us where their challenges are. It is sort of a feedback loop so that we can help define the art of the possible. There is the technology push and then there’s the science pull,” Bonetti offered. 

Shortly after the interview, Bonetti followed up with an emailed call-me-maybe message: “One thing I forgot to add during the interview is that if there are SIGNAL readers or program offices who want to start a conversation about partnering with SLAC-TID, they can contact us through our website, https://tid.slac.stanford.edu/.”

When SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) turned on in 2009, the first-of-its-kind facility empowered researchers to investigate the material world with unprecedented resolution in space and time. In 2023, a major facility upgrade dialed up its speed, enabling the facility to generate up to 1 million pulses per second and set in motion a 1,000-fold increase in X-ray power, making LCLS the most powerful X-ray laser in the world.