A team of scientists working at the Advanced Light Source’s femtosecond beamline 6.0.2 have taken the first step toward controlling how matter interacts with x-rays, shaping x-ray pulses with other x-ray pulses, and eventually directing the paths chemical reactions can take.

The “Discovery” track of Berkeley Lab’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development proposal review encourages bold, highly innovative concepts with strong potential for impact in their fields, independent of divisional programs and lab-wide initiatives. The winning proposals for 2010 are described in a five-part series, beginning with research for a new way to deposit high-quality, transparent, metal-oxide films on the industrial scale, with implications for energy applications.

Accelerators are far from achieving the highest energies their builders aspire to, but size and cost may limit the kinds of facilities funding agencies can support. In the future, new kinds of machines will be needed to make further progress. Perhaps the most promising is the laser plasma accelerator. Berkeley Lab’s BELLA project is the most advanced laser wakefield accelerator now under development.

From their humble beginnings as offshoots of the ordinary electric light bulb, particle accelerators have evolved in surprising directions. Among the most productive and promising developments have been light sources, first in the form of electron storage rings — of which the Advanced Light Source is the world’s premier source of soft x-rays — and increasingly as versatile and sophisticated free electron lasers, the next generation of light sources now being studied at Berkeley Lab.

Five Berkeley Lab physicists have been named Fellows of the American Physical Society (APS) for 2009, nominated and elected by their peers for accomplishments ranging from ingenious technological advances to theoretical explorations.

The Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment II (NDCX-II) now under construction at Berkeley Lab is an accelerator designed to create warm dense matter. The job required extensive computer modeling, including the animated simulations shown in this feature story.

Wim Leemans is one of six 2009 recipients of the U.S. Department of Energy’s highest honor, the E. O. Lawrence Award, for his pioneering research with laser wakefield accelerators.

After more than a year of repairs, the Large Hadron Collider located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland is back on track to create high-energy particle collisions that may yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

A symposium in Washington organized by the Office of High Energy Physics will break new ground in integrating research and development of many kinds of accelerators in many fields.

Warm dense matter exists in the cores of gas giant planets and the preliminary stages of nuclear fusion, among other inaccessible places. With an accelerator built at Berkeley Lab by physicists and engineers in the Heavy Ion Fusion Science Virtual National Laboratory, a collaboration of Berkeley Lab, Livermore, and Princeton, scientists will soon be able to study it in the laboratory.