Last month, we took a look at the headquarters of the most beautiful science laboratories and research institutes in the world. Now it’s time to go inside. As it turns out, scientists and their machines, labs and tools are even more amazing then the buildings they work in.
Here’s a panoramic image of the interior of Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source.
Picture: LBNL ALS
An experimental apparatus under ultra-high vacuum for the study of magnetism and electronic structures at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.
Picture: P. Ginter/ESRF
An experimental set-up at the Soft X-Ray (SXR) materials science station at Linac Coherent Light Source, at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University.
Picture: SLAC
A Canadian Light Source scientist observes a sample in the Resonant Elastic and Inelastic Soft X-Ray Scattering (REIXS) endstation.
Picture: Canadian Light Source
The Target Chamber of the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Picture: Jacqueline McBride/LLNL
An experiment at the Trident Laser Facility, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Picture: LeRoy Sanchez/LANL
The STAR Detector at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider tracks and analyses thousands of particles.
Picture: BNL
The Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, is a part of the Pulsed Power Program.
Picture: Sandia Labs
The Irradiation Assisted Stress Corrosion Cracking rig at Idaho National Laboratory enables the study of how certain stresses affect nuclear materials like advanced alloys.
Picture: INL
The Process Development and Integration Laboratory at the National Renewable Energy Lab’s Solar Energy Research Institute.
Picture: Dennis Schroeder/NREL
A Fermilab scientist with one of the two “horns” that focus the particle beam for the MINOS neutrino experiment.
Picture: Peter Ginter/FNAL
A physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center watches laser tests on crystal detectors.
Picture: Peter Ginter/SLAC
Cabling-up the semiconductor tracker for ATLAS, one of the four enormous detectors for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Picture: Peter Ginter/NIKHEF
Assembly of superconducting cavities in their cryostat at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, Jefferson Lab.
Picture: Jefferson Lab/DOE
An infrared laser experiment at the US Army Research Laboratory’s Adelphi Laboratory Center in the Sensors and Electron Devices Directorate.
Picture: Doug LaFon/US Army Research Laboratory
An ultra high vacuum chamber at the MIES lab, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia.
Picture: Flinders
Lab assistants work with Centennial’s electron microscope at North Carolina State University.
Picture: NCSU
Picture: Silicon Vertex Tracker, the heart of the BABAR experiment at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Peter Ginter/SLAC)