Bringing Discoveries to Light: Six Ways the Advanced Light Source Is Accelerating Technology Breakthroughs for Society

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.