The reinvention of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 1992–2012

Abstract

This article examines the most recent history of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with particular emphasis on how this laboratory shifted its research program from accelerator-based particle physics towards astroparticle physics, cosmology and multidisciplinary photon science. Photon science became the central experimental research program through a series of changes in the organisational, scientific, and infrastructural set-up and in its science policy context. The article shows that SLAC's reinvention unfolded in a science policy context in which funding priorities drifted towards the materials sciences and the life sciences at the expense of nuclear and particle physics, which had dominated science budgets during the Cold War. SLAC took a lead position in this global development by partly dismantling and also redeploying scientific and technical capabilities from its particle physics program for these new fields, thus, providing novel experimental facilities for user communities to expand across academia and industry.

Systematising Serendipity for Big Science Infrastructures: the ATTRACT Project

“…Secondly, the tenacious success of the Standard Model has left aspiring physicists scrambling for new avenues to conduct physics, leading them to astrophysics and cosmology, as well as more distant fields in biology and life sciences (Galison 2016). In addition, the nature of big science infrastructures has become more heterogeneous; today we now see traditional particle accelerators and nuclear reactors work alongside synchrotron radiation, neutron scattering, and free electron laser facilities, where the empirical scope has widened to materials science, chemistry, energy, condensed matter physics, nanoscience, biology, biotechnology and pharmacology (Doing 2009;Heinze & Hallonsten 2017). Finally, big science infrastructures are no longer constrained by national security mandates, and must now compete in a global scientific market with increased mobility, transparency, and competition.…”