BATON ROUGE — LSU has been awarded a $20 million National Science Foundation grant to build a one-of-a-kind ultrafast X-ray facility that could help scientists answer fundamental questions about how atomic and molecular forces operate, university officials said Thursday.

The Mid-scale Research Infrastructure grant from the NSF will be used to build the Laboratory for Next-Generation X-ray Science and Technology, a laser-driven X-ray facility that will allow researchers to watch some of nature's fastest processes as they happen.

LaNeXT, officials said, will also pave the way toward a new and more energy-efficient synchrotron, featuring more compact technology that could lead to substantial cost reductions. This could potentially save the federal government up to $20 billion per year in electricity bills—while introducing new scientific opportunities, which would be tested first nationwide at LSU.

The facility will allow scientists to capture motion at the atomic and molecular level in billionths and quadrillionths of a second, helping find answers to questions like how molecules rearrange during chemical reactions, how materials respond to heat, stress and light, and how biological molecules change shape as they carry out the processes of life.

Once complete, LaNeXT will generate X-ray pulses as short as 30 femtoseconds. One femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second, during which light travels only about the width of a small bacterium.

"The research advances LSU will be able to achieve with these new capabilities puts our researchers, students and partners at the forefront of materials and particle science," Chancellor Jim Dalton said. "LaNeXT enables LSU to close a critical research gap—the ability to see molecules in motion—positioning our teams as key collaborators on research with national labs and university peers such as Stanford, Berkeley and MIT, placing us alongside prestigious top 50 research institutions."

LaNeXT will be open to scientists nationwide, drawing researchers from universities, national laboratories and industry to Baton Rouge and anchoring an advanced-instrumentation ecosystem in Louisiana.

The project will serve as a training pipeline for beamline scientists, accelerator physicists and instrumentation engineers. In partnership with Southern University and Xavier University, LaNeXT will give undergraduate and graduate students hands-on roles in design, component construction, commissioning and more, LSU officials said.