The National laboratory Lawrence Berkeley ( Ernest Orlando Lawrence National Laboratory , in the past Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and more known under the name of Berkeley Lab or LBNL ), is a national laboratory American, depend on the Department of energy and located at Berkeley, California. It is managed by the the University of California. The research led to the LBNL is civil and not - glazes by secrecy-defense.

The laboratory, founded in 1931 under the name of Radiation Laboratory by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, is oldest of the American national laboratories. Initially located on the campus of Berkeley, he moved on his current site in 1940. Since its creation, eleven of its researchers saw their work rewarded by the Nobel Prize: Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin Mr. McMillan, Owen Chamberlain, Emilio Gino Segrè, Donald A. Glaser, Melvin Calvin, Shine Alvarez, Yuan T. Lee, Steven Chu and George Smoot.

Organization and operation

The site is composed of 76 buildings built on the hills dominating the campus of the the University of California to Berkeley. The laboratory employs on the whole nearly 4000 people, among whom 800 students and accommodates each year more than 2000 external researchers.

The laboratory includes/understands 15 departments, credits in fields such that the Data-processing , the Sciences of energy or Biology. Other services are devoted to the customer support researchers. Many research projects federate them financings and personnel of several departments at the same time. In particular the Data-processing and the Engineerings are omnipresent in biology and physics.

History

The discovery of the artificial Radioactivity by Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie in 1934 opens an unforeseen research field with the Radiation Laboratory : the creation of new Radioelement S by bombardment of an element with cores of Deuterium (deuterons) or Neutron S. the manufacture of some of these radioelements, as the Sodium 24, in sufficient quantity for biomedical research ensures part of the necessary financing in order to improve the Cyclotron unceasingly. This work in Radiobiology, takes a considerable importance. The physicists of the Radiation Laboratory , always in money search, become little by little slaves of the cyclotron, giving up the research projects long-term and making turn the machine harms and day. This situation changes only with the Second world war and the enormous financial effort authorized by the United States to obtain the nuclear weapon.

In addition to radiobiology, the Radiation Laboratory is pioneer in another interdisciplinary research task around the radioelements produced by the cyclotron: the study of the properties of the radioactive Isotope S or Radiochemistry. He works in close cooperation with the department of Chemistry of Berkeley including three of its members, Gilbert Newton Lewis, Willard Frank Libby and Samuel Ruben, more particularly plays a part of intermediaries. The department of Chemistry directed by Wendell Latimer is since 1930 approximately one of the principal places of rise of radiochemistry out of Europe. It thus accommodates the first meter Geiger-Müller and the first source neutrons built in the United States.

With reading

• J.L. Heilbron and R.W. Seidel, Lawrence and his laboratory: history has off the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, volume I, University off California Press, Berkeley, 1989.