 So I now have the pleasure to introduce Chi Cheng Cao to talk about energy research at SLAC. Dr. Cao has been the director of SLAC since 2012 and is also a professor of photon science. His research focuses on x-ray physics, superconductivity, magnetic materials, and the properties of materials under high pressure. So welcome Dr. Cao and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, thank you for inviting me, gave me a chance to talk to you. Looks like you guys are having a lot of fun already. We're doing our best. Okay this is really an unusual time, right? So I imagine in the lab now we try to bring the laboratory back in operations. About a third, people are now back at work now. The research actually started now. So I hope to see you at some point in the lab. Okay next slide. So I thought I used a 30-minute timer so we have to introduce you what SLAC is and what DOE lab system is and also give you the example of growing energy research program at SLAC and then I end with an opportunity for you to get involved more at SLAC. Most people probably never heard of DOE labs. When people think about DOE, right, they think we do a lot of energy, but the DOE mission space if you look at it, there are four primary mission space started with natural security because the system was built after World War II, right in the middle of World War II. So DOE is the steward of all the nuclear weapons for the United States. So how designed a weapon and steward the weapons and materials. And then DOE is also the largest sponsor of physical sciences. So SLAC is one of the DOE labs where we built large accelerators for people to utilize, right, the things that you cannot build by either company or universities. And then there's something about energy. DOE actually does do some energy research that started probably during the oil embargo in the 70s. That's why the name got changed in the Department of Energy. That's very relevant today, of course. And then DOE has another big part of the mission is cleaned up the legacy waste because during World War II when we had to purify, concentrate isotope for the bombs, there's a lot of the chemical processes used and a lot of the waste are still sitting in the tanks across the country that cost billions of dollars a year just to keep them safe. And so to all together you can see the budget currently is $38 billion now. And what's relevant to SLAC is also science because we funded primarily by all the science. All the science budget today is about $7 billion. DOE also doing things beyond these four mission space because the capability we have can be used for other things too, obviously. So the X-ray facility at SLAC has been used to solve protein structures which then can be used to design drugs. The last couple of months there are a few very important structures are solved at SLAC. These are the spike proteins on the SARS viruses where that's a piece that attached to the cell membrane and opens up the cell wall so that the genetic information from the virus can go into the cell. But once you know the data atomic structure of those spike proteins, you can then see how antibody or the drugs you want to use, how they bind to it. That becomes a therapeutic strategy. We also have structures solved for the messenger RNA if you renew more than that. The vaccine being developed is a different strategy. It's actually put a string of messenger RNA from the virus that produced the spike protein, put it into your body. So your body then produces antibody. You have an immune system and then when the real virus gets into your body, you will have some immune system to counter that. So we do a lot of that kind of work because of the tools we have. And also a DOE system is the steward of all the supercomputers in the United States. So you want to do modeling simulation on something very big. You come to use the DOE for facility tool. So this is how the DOE system set up. There are 17 labs. You can see the map on the left-hand side give you a sense of where they are. And this is something quite unique in the world. I think if you from Europe, you would know the CNRS system in France, the Humpho Society in Germany, and China has the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All these sort of large government-funded research networks. As we go into the future, and these become even more important than before. Because the things we have to do now are on a much larger scale. Okay, next slide. So specifically about Slack then. Slack started in the 60s in particle physics. But now we are a multi-programmed lab. We look at things from the smallest, like I said, looking at atomic structures, or deep inside the nucleus. We are participating in the experiment at CERN to look at the Higgs and beyond the standard model. We look at the largest thing in the universe. We have built telescopes to look at how the universe continues to expand and understand why. Try to understand why. Also try to understand what's the origin of the dark matters that we don't understand yet. And anything in between. It's actually very flexible. We can initiate any new aeroscience we want to. Label tea can invest in that to get them started. You can also see, oh, on the right-hand side, you can see that sort of distribution of funding. The total funding for the lab is somewhere between five, six, seven hundred million dollars. It depends on how many construction projects we have at any given time. And the pie chart shows you the funding from different parts of DOE, also science. You can see the biggest part is called the basic energy sciences, which funds chemistry and material science and large X-ray facilities that we have. And then we have hydrogen physics. And then you can also see the sliver there called energy efficiency and renewables. That's where the, I mentioned before in the previous slide, there's a big part of DOE funding in more applied energy technology and SLAC and Stanford together. We started to make enroll in that now over the last five years or so. And that's a program being growing, which you will see some of the examples later on. So we are part of Stanford. So SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the Department of Energy. And so there's a lot of collaboration between campus and SLAC. It's two miles between the laboratory and campus. There's a bus that takes you up and down. It's not most convenient, but it works. And a lot of students and poll posts are here. Some of you are, if you're interested, you can see there are a few hundred graduate students and postdoc working at SLAC or on campus through the funding from the Department of Energy. And we have a lot of joint centers and faculties. Like I said, the lab was built in the 60s. At the time, it was the idea of, you know, we have protons and electrons and neutrons. And the question was, what's inside? People always want, what's the next thing? And so that was the time when the theory of quarks was proposed. So a few physics faculty said, okay, we need to build the highest energy electron accelerator where we can actually probe that. Like lot of it did back in the old days is exactly the same even today. You would throw a very high energy particle to the target. If the target is uniform, the particle will spread around evenly. If the particle has a structure like atom or like a quark inside protons and neutrons, then you will see an angular distribution of the particle you send in get distributed. And it will be energy loss. So essentially, what you do is you have a very energy particle hitting something. You have a very large detector that detects the thing coming from that collision. And you analyze the position and energy of what comes off it. So that led to the discovery of quarks and then several Nobel Prize winners throughout the 70s, 80s. And from then we build on top of that the colliding beam instead of fixed target experiments. And that led to so every 10, 15 years, you'll be one of these billion dollars thing get built and you finish the experiment, you move on to the next frontier. Now, in parallel then, in the 70s, when Bert Richter built a spear, which is a colliding beam for facility, two faculty from the physics went to Bert and said, can we use x-ray generated from the storage rings from the synchrotrons? Because that is very intense compared to x-ray source at the time you can generate from in the lab. And Bert's with fine, so they put a window in there, then they went to Sears and got, you know, build a woodshed. Some graduate student then actually build a first set of experiment in the 70s. That's what SSRL, that's how we started to get into the x-ray business. A storage ring compared to if you have done x-ray defaction experiment in your lab source, the storage ring is a million times stronger. Imagine the kind of thing that you barely see or you couldn't see. Now you're able to see because we have the storage rings. And with that, several Nobel Prize came out of that, like I was telling you that one of the very powerful use of x-ray is to determine atomic structure of matters. In the case of protein structures, so Roger Kornberg and Brian Kabelka at Stanford sort of used storage ring to tackle the hardest structure they wanted to solve. And so every few years, there will be a Nobel Prize because they actually solve one of the very important structures. So that sort of take us all the way up to about 2000. At that point, the high energy physics collider experiment had moved on. The slack side is not big enough anymore to build the highest energy collider anymore. And that kind of experiment went to Fermilab in the United States and then CERN. So the laboratory needs to find a new mission for the future. So next slide. So on the particle physics side, we pivot between Stanford and Slack with the funding from Frick Coughley, build a Coughley Institute at Stanford and Slack. So there are two buildings, one at Slack side, one on campus, and university devoted eight faculty slots. And Coughley Foundation provided an endowment. So that's how we got started to pivot from experiment ground-based in the laboratory. We start to build telescopes and satellites so we can look into the sky because a space is in fact is much bigger actually than we can ever build on Earth. Imagine things close to a black hole, right? Anything get close to the black hole gets stuck into it and then the electron proton in the gas before they get exerted into it will be extremely high speed. That's why generating the gamma rays that we observe actually every second or so, there's a gamma ray going through my and your body. It goes right through because the energy is so high. That's how Slack started to go into astrophysics and cosmology. We took our ability in building big detectors and how to handle large amount of data applied then to looking into the sky. So that's a very big part of the lab now as you see the pie chart about 20%, 25% of the lab still. And so one of the most exciting things going on right now is the large synoptic survey telescope that in the second panel it's been built at Chile. It's a 3.2 gigapixel cgd camera, the largest ccd camera ever built. And you will look at this sky quickly every few days. We will cover half the sky, southern sky. It will record 10% of all the known galaxy in the universe. And then we will take data for 10 years to see how things evolve in time. That collection of data will be made available to anyone in the world to understand dark energy and dark matter. So it's a very exciting time. It will come aligned 2023. It's almost there. So we are at the final stage of putting together the detector. Early next year I think the data will be shipped to Chile. Okay, next slide. So then we then repurpose the Linux. So you see on the upper right hand corner SSRL, the yellow ring, right? Been running since the 70s and have been upgraded very up to three, four times now. Meantime we are building using the Linux to build the free electron laser. So storage ring, you have the electron going around, they eventually become equilibrium. So there's a certain fasciations limit the size of the electron beam. Whereas the Linux, you can shoot the electron beam only once. You can make that electron beam extremely bright, very, very, very small. So that then gives us the ability to build almost like a laser-like X-ray beam. It's way before you all were even born. When Reagan was the president, there's something called the Star Wars. It tried to have a direct energy weapon to shoot down things in space. Unfortunately, while it's coming back again, there's a lot of activity in the space which extremely important for us. But that technology for building FEL actually started way back in the 70s at Stanford on infrared wavelengths and got extrapolated now to one length from X-ray. So it's an incredible feat of technology and physics. So the FEF started the first commission 2009, almost 10 years ago. Like introduction about me, I do X-rays, use X-ray to pull materials. That's why I came to Slack because I want to be using the X-rays from the free electron laser. So the red part of the beam on the right-hand side, the red part of the Linux was old technology, copper Linux that can fire 120 hertz. The peak power of the free electron laser, it's a billion times compared to the storage ring. So the numbers. The storage ring is about a million times on average in terms of intensity compared to your lab source. The FEF compact them into a femtosecond. All the X-ray now get into a femtosecond and spatially coherent. So you have this peak power. You hit something. If you focus the beam down, the thing disappeared. But since it's so fast, the atom have no chance to move. You capture the structure before the material gets destroyed. So that's where the red part is. When I came, we made a proposal to DOE to use the new technology, the superconducting technology. So on the blue part, on the left-hand side, that's a million megahertz now. So it went from 100 hertz to a megahertz. So that means the average power go up by 10,000 times. So the power of this device is incredible. That will allow us to do things that we can only imagine at this point. So also, too, it's being constructed at the moment. It will come online in 2023 also. So there's a lot of things 2023 would be online at Slack, from study chemistry materials to study the universe. Okay. So let me, next slide. Okay. So let me switch to energy now. So there are the last 10 years or so, as we start to build up the X-ray capability, we start to think about what else can we do between staff and Slack. Like I said, the best use of X-ray is the determined structure of material of any kind. Also imaging. You can imagine things. You can actually make movies out of the things. So we start to bring people in from Stanford, also elsewhere, to look at scientifically what are the most challenging problems we can solve. And one of them is how do we turn CO2 back into field? Ideally, what you want is all that CO2 in here, we can recapture them, turn them back into field again. Right? Because liquid field has the highest energy density for storage. Also utilize all the infrastructure we have. So that was one of these holy grail. Got started. So there's a joint center for catalysis between Stanford and Slack. Some of you will probably be involved. It's going after that. And then the other side of it is thinking about you have solar energy being deployed everywhere now. So a lot of electron generated. Right? So how do we use that electron to transform chemicals? Right? So that's related. So thermal chemical catalysis, there's an electrochemical catalysis. So the effort is a very big effort between Stanford and Slack. And we utilize the tools we have, also the theoretical work being done. Recently, we start to get involved. Like I showed you before, there's a more applied energy side of the DOE. What we realize is pre-court Institute and other energy research center at Stanford. There are a lot of people working on batteries. Since equity is good for looking at it, we thought, well, that may be an opportunity between Stanford and Slack. Right? So several material science and chemical engineering faculty involved with Slack looking at how do you build the chemistry new electrode? How do you use artificial intelligence to learn how do you do this cycling? Because all these things are connected. Right? It depends on the way you intend to use the battery. It may change the formulation you want. Right? It actually allows you to see in real time how those things are happening, either looking at a structure or looking at images. So this work has taken off the last five years. There's a lot of funding from DOE, also from industry. We just finished a laboratory building two years ago now. And there's a lot of lab space are devoted to this work now so we can actually do more. Next slide. So like I said, the solar energies, right? So there are real questions about can we extend the lifetime of a solar panel? Imagine you can extend the solar panel lifetime from 30 years to 50 years. Right? That capital investment will be advertised even more. Right? And so what people start to realize is the silicon is perfect. Can last forever. The materials issues actually is how the silicon wafer attached to the solar panel around it is the polymer, the glues, the contact, all these things. So this is a very applied work because you're really talking about how do you extend the lifetime of these things based on understanding of materials. And so that is the space we are working on for a while. You probably will hear more throughout the week. There are also new materials. You probably heard about these perovskites. It has a very surprisingly high efficiency and we try to understand those as well. Next slide. So newer things. So DOE I think have put a new emphasis on how do we recycle polymers, plastics, right? There's a lot of them in the ocean that have been disposed. So the idea is can we find ways to digest them or even better build a much more smarter from the beginning so they can be biodegradable. There's a significant funding in that direction now. We just started. Next slide. The other thing is about water supply. You probably all heard about energy water nexus. I've been talking about been talked about for a while now. There's a new initiative on DOE to fund these things. Again, you can see we need new materials on the membrane can make it very smart. You can do a lot of filtering with very low energy. And this kind of research also relevant to pandemic. Imagine the mass that we wear. If we have membrane material can filter out microbes and other things. So this is a new area which just started. So now goes, okay, so we can look at the material. People can make something. It takes a long time, right? So can we speed all this up? By factor 10, right? So there's a lot of work being done by machine learning and doing extremely high throughput both experimentally or using computer. So we can actually accelerate this development. Next slide. On the bigger scale, you already seen a couple of weeks ago, we have to shut down power to a lot of people because when the temperature got really hot, we're relying too much on renewable at the moment. The grid and the supply are not matched well enough. So there's a lot of what needs to be done on how to rebuild the grid that we have, make the grid efficient in this new economy that we have with a lot of alternative energy sources. Next slide. Okay, so how do you get involved with Slack? In previous years, they actually did a tour at the end of the week that I would show you around to see all the facility we just talked about. So we won't have that. But there are a lot of things you can get involved through a lot of activities. I think throughout the week, you will hear a lot of PIs speaking to you about the things that we're working on. The lab is, like I said, there's a lot of new opportunity for you to be involved. That's it. Great, thank you so much. I think we have time for a couple questions. Mayank, you want to start? Great. Hi, my name is Mayank Gurda. I'm an incoming Sloan fellow at the GSB. And I think you partly answered my question in the last couple of slides. But just in terms of the issues in front of us, in terms of climate change and energy 2.0, and innovation, etc., what is the best way to get involved in a cross-disciplinary basis with the slack of auditory and the research happening there? One of the themes from Arun Majandar's talk was about accelerating basically commercial outcomes where the starting point is cutting edge research at labs such as slack. So what is the best way for graduate students to get involved in a cross-disciplinary basis outside of this course during this week? It's a very good question. So Stanford actually has activity relevant to this from the policy side, to techno-economic analysis, and to regulatory things that the government need to evolve, and then to the technology that we do. So pre-chord is about as good as I can see in terms of trying to connect everything. So probably pay attention to events there. I think one of the goals university tried to do, you probably haven't heard, there's a reshaping, re-imaging of the school, the earth science, try to pull all these things together in a more systematic way than we have done before. So pay attention to that too. Great. If there's any way we can help, please let us know. We have a couple of requests for a tour of Slack once we're able to do so. Yeah, okay, so we probably should think about how can we do some virtual tours for people. Yeah, a virtual tour in the meantime would be great. And yeah, once I think that's definitely something we would want to try to do, I mean, who knows when we'll be able to do in-person events like that. But yeah, that's a very good point. We try to bring small group of people up now. Yeah, so Kate, probably do the fine. So email me afterwards, then we can see can we assign some staff working with some of you, right? We can try to design these virtual tours. Great. Yeah, we'll definitely talk offline about that. All right, that's my time. We're going great. Well, if there are no more questions, we'll thank you very much, Dr. Cao. Thank you. It was great to hear your talk. It was wonderful. Yeah, hope to see you all someplace.