LBNL overlooking the Berkeley central campus and San Francisco Bay ()
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 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 II, and along with the MIT Radiation Laboratory (which helped to develop radar), ushered in the era of "Big Science." Using the newly created 184" Cyclotron as a mass spectrometer, Lawrence and his colleagues (including Berkeley physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who often worked with the researchers at the lab]]) developed the principle behind the electromagnetic enrichment of uranium, 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.
