When Eadweard Muybridge used slow-motion photography to capture Leland Stanford’s horse Electioneer in motion, he had no idea that more than 125 years later, the same concept would be applied to super-fast particle physics in the very same place.

Last Friday, ground was broken at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) where the new Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) will be built. The new project is an extremely powerful, $379-million laser, designed to photograph molecules and chemical reactions that previously evaded the eye of existing equipment.

“This will be the world’s first X-ray-free electron laser,” Provost John Etchemendy said. “Currently, high-power X-ray beams are the main technique for studying the structure of complex molecules. But to do so with current, state-of-the-art X-ray beams, scientists must first crystallize the molecule to immobilize it before pictures can be taken.”

The new laser will be faster and more powerful, allowing it to take stop-action images and even moving pictures of reactions that were previously impossible to see. These advances will be significant across chemistry, biology and materials science, Etchemendy said. Six Nobel Prizes have resulted from work done at SLAC, and according to the Provost, the new project has already attracted several new faculty from around the world.

The Stanford Band played at the groundbreaking ceremony clad in hard hats, entertaining the button-down crowd with its usual madcap revelry.

The project officially began in 2003 when the Department of Energy’s Office of Science pushed the full request through Congress. After three years of engineering, design, research and development, the physical manifestation is finally underway.

LCLS is a collaboration between six national laboratories and universities. Construction on the 180,000 cubic yard excavation site is now underway adjacent to existing SLAC facilities and include 100,00 square feet of workspace, a central laboratory and underground experimental halls. The laser itself will start with existing SLAC facilities (saving $300 million) but ultimately require a new half-mile tunnel.

Neil Calder, the Director of Communications at SLAC, told the Daily that LCLS will be the first facility of its kind.

“Europeans will build one in Hamburg, and the Japanese are building one also,” Calder said. “We will have at least four years’ lead due to technologies developed here at Stanford. LCLS guarantees SLAC’s position as a world-class research lab for the foreseeable future.”

The new X-ray laser will send out pulses 1,000 times shorter, and 10 billion times brighter than pulses from the existing equipment at SLAC. The new laser, which allows for videos to be made of reactions, emits a trillion rays within a needle-thin beam.

“The extreme intensity of LCLS’s x-ray radiation will severely damage matter,” SLAC said in a press release. “But the very fast time scale of the pulses allows the beam, like a nimble cat burglar, to gather the goods and get out before the consequences set in.”

Though, according to Calder, there is no danger associated with what is essentially a really big “laser.”

“Though it is a very intense and very powerful beam of light, it is also tiny, hitting samples that are at the molecular scale,” he said. “There is no James Bond, death-ray style danger.”

LCLC is scheduled to begin operations in 2009 and will become the main experimental apparatus at SLAC in coming years.