Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility

Los Alamos Neutron Science Center

Field of research	Particle physics
Location	New Mexico
Affiliations	Los Alamos National Laboratory
Website	lansce.lanl.gov

The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE), formerly known as the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (LAMPF) is one of the world's most powerful linear accelerators. It is located in Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in Technical Area 53 (TA-53). It was the most powerful linear accelerator in the world when it was opened in June 1972. The technology used in the accelerator was developed in part by the nuclear physicist Louis Rosen. The facility is capable of accelerating protons up to 800 MeV. Multiple beamlines allow for a variety of experiments to be run at once, and the facility is used for many types of research in materials testing and neutron science. It is also used for medical radioisotope production.

LANSCE provides the scientific community with intense sources of neutrons with the capability of performing experiments supporting civilian and national security research. The Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Energy, and Office of Science and Technology – the principal sponsors of LANSCE – have synergistic long-term needs for the accelerator and neutron science that is the heart of LANSCE. LANSCE provides solutions to national security problems. It serves an international user community conducting diverse forefront basic and applied research.

Since 1972, the 800-million-electronvolt (MeV) accelerator and its attendant facilities at Technical Area 53 (TA-53, often referred to as "the Mesa") at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been a resource to a broad international community of scientific researchers. The Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (LAMPF), as it was originally called, hosted about 1000 users per year to perform medium energy physics experiments.

In 1977, a pulsed spallation neutron source was commissioned to supply moderated and unmoderated neutrons to time-of-flight experiments in the facility called the Weapons Neutron Research (WNR) Center. Neutron scattering experiments were started immediately and by 1983 the Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences was funding a formal user program. Beginning in 1985, with the completion of the Proton Storage Ring (PSR) that compresses proton pulses from 750 microseconds to a quarter of a microsecond, the Los Alamos Neutron Scattering Center (LANSCE), now known as the Lujan Center, was established while WNR was expanded to other spallation sources on the accelerator beam.