Solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges, from computing and energy technologies to cancer research and drug discovery, rely on our ability to understand the detailed composition of matter. Ultrabright light sources powered by specialized particle accelerators called synchrotrons help scientists untangle the physical, chemical, and electronic makeup of these molecular mysteries, and advance science and technology breakthroughs that ensure the safety and security of a thriving society.

The Advanced Light Source (ALS), a Department of Energy, Office of Science, user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), is one of the most powerful synchrotron light sources in the world. Since its launch in 1993, as many as 2,000 users a year from industry, academia, and the national labs rely on the ALS and its experts to conduct highly specialized research, resulting in over 17,000 scientific publications spanning more than 30 years of research, with numerous contributions leading to commercial advances in products we use every day such as batteries and microchips for our devices, and countermeasures against infectious disease.

Unlike an optical microscope that uses visible light to visualize small objects, the ALS synchrotron uses X-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared light. This range of ultrabright light allows researchers to probe a material’s atomic and electronic structures. Such versatility allows the ALS’s thousands of users to design new materials with particular properties as well as study biological processes at the molecular level that cannot be detected with visible light.

Over the past three decades, the ALS has achieved significant milestones enabling scientific discoveries and technology breakthroughs for the benefit of society. Here are six of the most impactful:

Making Better Batteries

Artistic rendition of lithium-ion battery particles under the illumination of a finely focused X-ray beam. (Credit: Stanford, Chueh Group)

The ALS has facilitated key discoveries about battery materials, potentially leading to more efficient, powerful, and longer-lasting batteries. Scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) and soft X-ray ptychography, a higher-resolution computational reconstruction of X-ray images, at the ALS helped researchers learn how defects impact battery performance. Other researchers used STXM to create nanoscale movies of battery particles in action, and in situ resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) to identify novel chemical states that could improve battery performance at lower costs.

Pioneering New Methods to Manufacture Smaller, Faster Computer Microchips

Since the 1990s, Berkeley Lab’s Center for X-Ray Optics (CXRO) has harnessed vacuum ultraviolet light from the ALS to pioneer extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography and related techniques. This groundbreaking research has been crucial in the adoption of EUV lithography in cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing, now integral to producing advanced microchips for computers and smartphones. As EUV lithography progresses to its next generation, CXRO, in close collaboration with the ALS and the Center for High Precision Patterning Science (CHiPPS) – a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center at Berkeley Lab – remains at the forefront of addressing key challenges in optics, masks, and materials, driving the development of even smaller semiconductor features for next-generation electronics.

Decoding Protein Structures for Drug Discovery and Biosecurity Research

ALS capabilities have helped scientists unravel the 3D structure of proteins, aiding cancer therapy development and the nation’s efforts to tackle emerging health threats. Researchers have revealed a modern cancer drug’s mechanism by studying ancient proteins; discovered new targets for the treatment of lung, colorectal, and pancreatic cancer; and examined antibodies that neutralize infectious respiratory diseases like COVID-19. The ALS has also played key roles in the development of Nobel Prize-winning science for gene editing and the computational prediction of protein structures. The ALS generates light for a number of capabilities, such as X-ray crystallography, X-ray scattering, X-ray footprinting, infrared spectroscopy, and soft X-ray tomography, that have applications across a diverse range of biological research.

Advancing Quantum Research for Electronics of the Future

The ALS has played a critical role in the discovery of new quantum materials, which could lay the foundation for new approaches to quantum computing and other exciting technologies of the future. Powerful tools at the ALS led to the discovery of superconducting topological insulators, a type of material that may conduct electricity only on its surface, and a one-atom-thin magnet that could advance next-generation memory devices.

Tracing the Origins of the Solar System

Advanced tools at the ALS helped scientists uncover new details about the early universe, including how our solar system and planets evolved, and how the building blocks of life formed billions of years ago in the extreme cold of space. Scientists have also used the ALS to better understand how spacecraft materials perform under extreme conditions.

Revolutionizing Interface Science for Energy Applications

Over the past 30 years, innovations at the ALS have greatly advanced interface science, which studies molecular interactions at the boundaries between different materials or phases, such as solids, liquids, or gases. Notable breakthroughs include Berkeley Lab researchers using X-ray absorption spectroscopy to record the first observations of the molecular structure of liquid water on a gold electrode under different battery conditions. And in another first, Berkeley Lab researchers used a technique called X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (AP-XPS) – which was pioneered at the ALS – to understand how copper-based catalysts work at the atomic level, aiding the design of better industrial catalysts for converting carbon dioxide into fuels and chemicals, and for hydrogen production.

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.