Tomorrow’s free electron lasers will use superconducting linear accelerators to accelerate a million or more electron bunches a second. Key to high brightness and high repetition rates is the accelerator’s electron injector. Berkeley Lab scientists are building a revolutionary injector prototype of the kind the new generation of light sources will require.

The Advanced Light Source — one of the world’s brightest sources of ultraviolet and soft x-ray beams — will maintain its position at the cutting edge of soft x-ray science thanks to $11.3 million in funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

A particle gun tested at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source and soon to be installed at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source fires liquid droplets less than a millionth of a meter in diameter, hundreds of thousands of times a second or faster. The sample jet sends the droplets across a tightly focused x-ray beam in single file, each droplet so small it contains only a single protein or virus.

The structure of a protein in days — not months or years — ushers in a new era in genomics research. Scientists have developed a high-throughput protein pipeline that could expedite the development of biofuels and elucidate how proteins carry out life’s vital functions.

How do some bacteria survive conditions that should kill them? In groundbreaking research, Berkeley Lab scientists used the Advanced Light Source to track chemical changes in individual bacteria that enable them to adapt to extreme environments.

The Department of Energy will invest $777 million in 46 new Energy Frontier Research Centers over the next five years as part of President Barack Obama’s plans to reinvigorate American science. Berkeley Lab will be home to the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2, led by Don DePaolo, director of the Earth Sciences Division, to study carbon dioxide storage deep underground.

Two chemically different polymers linked together to form self-assembling block copolymers can have the potential to vastly improve the properties and manufacturing processes of nanostructured materials. Using crystal structures as a template, researchers at Berkeley Lab and the University of Massachusetts Amherst have created perfect arrays of nanoscopic block-copolymer domains, packing 10 trillion bits to the square inch and extending over several square centimeters.

Scientists have brought to light new clues on how mother of pearl, or nacre, is formed using the polarized x-ray beams and nanoscale imaging capabilities of Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source

Using magnetic materials in computer technology requires packing ever more data into ever less space, while finding ever faster ways to read and write it. Among the best ways to study magnetism at the scale of the ultra-small and the ultra-fast is the technique known as magnetic soft x-ray microscopy.