Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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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 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.

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 current director of the Laboratory is Steven Chu.

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History

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The lab was founded in 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). 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 became too big, and potentially too dangerous, to house on the university grounds.

Image:Oak Ridge Y-12 Alpha Track.jpg

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 has 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.

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Accolades

Notable scientific accomplishments at the Lab since World War II include the observation of the antiproton and the discovery of several transuranic elements.

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.