Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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The Berkeley Lab is perched on a hill overlooking the Berkeley central campus and San Francisco Bay. |
The
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (
LBNL), formerly the
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory (
Rad Lab) and usually shortened to
Berkeley Lab or
LBL, is a
U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory (DOE) in
Berkeley, California conducting unclassified scientific research. It is managed and operated by the
University of California. The Berkeley Lab holds the distinction of being the oldest of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Laboratories.
The site consists of 76 buildings (owned by the U.S. Department of Energy) located on 183 acres (0.7 km²) (owned by the University of California) on the hills above the
University of California, Berkeley campus. Altogether, it has some 3,800 University of California employees, of which about 500 are students. Each year, the Lab also hosts more than 2,000 participating guests. There are approximately two dozen DOE employees stationed at the laboratory to provide federal oversight of LBNL's work for the DOE.
The Laboratory's 17 scientific divisions are organized within the areas of Computing Sciences, Physical Sciences, Life and Environmental Sciences, and General Sciences. Many research projects are staffed and supported by multiple divisions, with computational and engineering integrated across the biosciences, general sciences and energy sciences.
The Laboratory Director is appointed by the
Regents of the University of California and reports to the President of the University of California. The current director of the Laboratory is
Steven Chu.
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The laboratory was originally located in a relatively small building on the university campus. |
The lab was founded as the
Radiation Laboratory on
August 26,
1931 by
Ernest Orlando Lawrence as a site for centering physics research around his new instrument, the
cyclotron (a type of
particle accelerator for which he won the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939). Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private
philanthropists for funding, often with the promise of developing new forms of
chemotherapy using
radioisotopes produced by the cyclotrons. After the laboratory was scooped on a number of fundamental discoveries that they felt they ought to have made, the "cyclotroneers" began to collaborate more closely with the
theoretical physicists in the Berkeley Department of Physics, led by
Robert Oppenheimer. The lab moved to its site on the hill above campus in
1940 as its machines (specifically, the 184-inch cyclotron) became too big, and potentially too dangerous, to house on the university grounds.
Lawrence courted government as his sponsor in the early years of the
Manhattan Project, the American effort to produce the first
atomic bomb during
World War II, and along with the
MIT Radiation Laboratory (which helped to develop
radar), ushered in the era of "
Big Science". Using the newly created 184-inch cyclotron as a
mass spectrometer, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the principle behind the
electromagnetic enrichment of
uranium, which was put to use in the
calutrons (named after the university) at the massive
Y-12 facility in
Oak Ridge, Tennessee and contributed some of the precious fissile material used for the "
Little Boy" bomb which was dropped on
Hiroshima,
Japan.
After the war, Lawrence sought to maintain strong government and military ties at his lab, which became incoporated into the new system of
Atomic Energy Commission (now Department of Energy) National Laboratories, but in the early 1950s set out that the lab's purpose would be primarily non-classified research, with classified weapon research taking place at
Los Alamos National Laboratory (established during the war) and the new
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, established by Lawrence and
Edward Teller from what was originally a splinter from the original Radiation Laboratory. Some weapons-related and collaborative research continued at LBL until the 1970s, however.
From the 1950s through the present, the laboratory has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Along with its historical specialty of accelerator research and nuclear physics, the laboratory currently maintains divisions which investigate
astrophysics,
nuclear fusion,
earth sciences,
genomics,
health physics,
computer science,
materials science, and
environmental science, among other areas. The laboratory is also the site of the a number of National User Facilities, including the
Advanced Light Source,
National Center for Electron Microscopy,
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the
Energy Sciences Network and the future
Molecular Foundry.
Notable scientific accomplishments at the Lab since
World War II include the observation of the
antiproton, the discovery of several transuranic
elements, and the confirmation of the discorvery of the
accelerating universe.
Since its inception, ten researchers at this Lab (
Ernest Lawrence,
Glenn T. Seaborg,
Edwin M. McMillan,
Owen Chamberlain,
Emilio G. Segrè,
Donald A. Glaser,
Melvin Calvin,
Luis W. Alvarez,
Yuan T. Lee, and
Steven Chu) have been awarded the
Nobel Prize.
Elements discovered by laboratory physicists include
Astatine,
Neptunium,
Plutonium,
Curium,
Americium,
Berkelium*,
Californium*,
Einsteinium,
Fermium,
Mendelevium,
Nobelium,
Lawrencium*,
Dubnium, and
Seaborgium*. Those elements listed with asterisks (*) are named after the laboratory or some of its principal scientists. The element
Technetium was discovered after Ernest Lawrence gave Emilio Segrè a
molybdenum strip from the LBL cyclotron.
*
LBNL (Official site)
*
University of California Office of Laboratory Management*
The Rad Lab - Ernest Lawrence and the Cyclotron: American Institute of Physics web exhibit
*
Lawrence and His Laboratory: A Historian's View of the Lawrence Years by J. L. Heilbron, Robert W. Seidel, and Bruce R. Wheaton.
*
A Century of Physics at Berkeley: Seedtime for "Big Science", 1930-1950
