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.

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.

BELLA has the potential to drastically cut the costs of performing accelerator-based scientific experiments. Systems like BELLA hold the promise of making possible a table-top accelerator with particle energies in the tens of GeV range.

Berkeley Lab researchers have taken a major step forward in the technology of spintronics by creating the “persistent spin helix,” which allows them to control the spin states of highly mobile electrons at different locations in a semiconductor and turn the collective state on and off at will. The discovery represents a new conservation law, an important advance in fundamental physics.