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The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), formerly the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and usually shortened to Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory in Berkeley, California conducting unclassified scientific research. It is managed and owned by the University of California.
The site consists of 76 buildings located on 183 acres (0.7 km˛) on the hills of the University of California, Berkeley campus. Altogether, it has some 4,000 employees, of which about 800 are students. Each year, the Lab also hosts more than 2,000 participating guests.
The Laboratory includes 15 divisions that are organized within the areas of Computing Sciences, Energy Sciences, Biosciences, General Sciences, and Resources and Operations. Many research projects are staffed and supported by multiple divisions, with computational and engineering integrated across the biosciences, general sciences and energy sciences.
Ernest Orlando Lawrence founded this Lab, the oldest of the national laboratories, in 1931. It was moved to its present site in 1940. Initially deriving the money for its cyclotron construction and use from philanthropy (often with the hopes of developing new forms of chemotherapy using radioisotopes), Lawrence courted government as his sponsor in the early years of the Manhattan Project, the American effort to produce the first atomic bomb during World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough, and along with the MIT Radiation LaboratoryThe Radiation Laboratory or often RadLab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was in operation from October 1940 until December 31, 1945. The Radiation Laboratory was one division of the National Defense Research Committee, a commission established by (which helped to develop radarThis article is about the device. For the fictional character in M A S H see Corporal Walter (Radar) O'Reilly. antenna (approximately 40m (130ft) in diameter) rotates on a track to observe activities near the horizon. Radar is an acronym for ra dio d etec), ushered in the era of " Big ScienceBig Science is a term used by scientists and historians of science to describe the change in science which occurred in industrial nations during and after World War II. While World War I was the first war in which science played a major role in warfare an". Using the newly created 184-inch Cyclotron as a mass spectrometer, Lawrence and his colleagues (including Berkeley physicist Robert OppenheimerLos Alamos National Laboratory beginning in 1943. Robert Oppenheimer ( April 22, 1904 February 18, 1967) was a Jewish-American physicist and the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to develop nuclear weapons, at the Los A, who often worked with the researchers at the lab) developed the principle behind the electromagnetic enrichmentIsotope separation is the process of concentrating specific isotopes of a chemical element by removing other isotopes. While in general chemical elements can be purified through chemical processes, isotopes of the same element have nearly identical chemic of uraniumUranium is a chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol U and atomic number 92. A heavy, silvery-white, toxic, metallic , and naturally- radioactive element, uranium belongs to the actinide series and its isotope uranium-235 is used as the, which was put to use at the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and contributed some of the precious material used for the bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. After the war, Lawrence sought to maintain strong government and military ties at his lab, but in the early 1950s set out that the lab's purpose would be primarily non-classified research, with classified weapon research taking place at Los Alamos National Laboratory (established during the war) and the new Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, established by Lawrence and Edward Teller from what was originally a splinter from the original Radiation Laboratory.
Notable scientific accomplishments at the Lab since World War II include the observation of the antiproton and the discovery of several transuranic elements.
Since its inception, nine researchers at this Lab ( Ernest Lawrence, Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin M. McMillan, Owen Chamberlain, Emilio G. Segrč, Donald A. Glaser, Melvin Calvin, Luis W. Alvarez, and Yuan T. Lee) have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
Elements discovered by laboratory physicists include Astatine, Neptunium, Plutonium, Curium, Americium, Berkelium*, Californium*, Einsteinium, Fermium, Mendelevium, Nobelium, Lawrencium*, Dubnium, and Seaborgium*. Those elements listed with asterisks (*) are named after the laboratory or some of its principle scientists. The element Technetium was discovered after Ernest Lawrence gave Emilio Segrč a molybdenum strip from the LBL cyclotron.