HEPL, founded in 1947 as Stanford's first Independent Laboratory, provides facilities and administrative structure enabling faculty to do research that spans across the boundaries of a single department or school—for example: physics & engineering or physics & biology/medicine. The Independent Laboratory concept, in many ways unique to Stanford, facilitates world-class research and teaching. The icons above represent 15 research programs currently administered by HEPL. Click on any icon for more information about that program. For more information about HEPL research, see the Research page.
The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. "We were waiting for this one," said Peter Michelson, the principal investigator on Fermi's Large Area Telescope at Stanford University. "Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to understand them."
In the January 13, 2009 issue of Physical Review Letters, the CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) Collaboration has published the latest results from its search for WIMPs (weakly interactive massive particles). These elusive particles are curently favored as the essence of dark matter.