Welcome to SLAC! It's a big place, over 2 miles long and ~500 acres, with 1500 people working here.
Above image: freeway 280 runs over SLAC's long linear accelerator
SLAC is directed by the Department of Energy (DOE), funded by congress, and is managed & staffed by Stanford university.
It's budget varies, but is in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
It's been in operation since the 1960's and has reinvented itself a few times over.
There's multiple ongoing big science projects here at SLAC, the largest of which is the giant X-ray laser: LCLS (Linac Coherent Light Source). It's where you work.
X-ray lasers work unlike other lasers in that they wiggle electrons to make light. They require a large facility and hundreds of people to support just one laser. Currently there are 8 X-ray lasers on the planet. These facilities both compete with and support each other. Sharing information while cultivating their own specials sauce. Each of these lasers will have some capabilities unique to the others.
Here's some short videos to help explain LCLS what happens at this place you work and why it exists.
LCLS does everything it can to make the most of The Laser (and it's associated tools of characterization) available available for public use, but there is a rigorous and competitive selection process that takes detailed technical proposals and months (often years) of planning + prep. scientists from all over the world come to run experiments at LCLS and the actual use of the laser will come down to a few days with long, strange hours (LCLS runs 24 hours a day). Use of LCLS is free to the selected applicants (called users), but it costs thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of dollars an hour to operate.
Working hard to keep LCLS instruments running is the experimental operations division. And that's where you come in. Welcome to tech support. We in the Experimental Technical Support Group keep things moving forward by installing, maintaining, and fixing. Plus there's more to it than that. And that's what you're here to learn in the coming weeks and months.
