AMAC provides material characterization, image acquisition, and elemental analysis across many scientific and engineering disciplines, including materials science and engineering, chemistry, life sciences, bioengineering, agriculture, food sciences, geology, and environmental sciences.
AMAC offers state-of-the-art equipment for light and fluorescence microscopy, electron beam microscopy and microanalysis, X-ray spectroscopy, and sample preparation.
Here, LSU Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Chris Marvel and PhD
student Emma McCarthy explore how lunar regolith could be transformed into usable
metals and energy.
The facility is staffed by an experienced group of dedicated and professional research specialists.
LSU doctoral student Emma McCarthy examines the interior of LSU's Spectra 300 Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope, which was installed in 2025 with $10 million in support from the U.S. Army.
The 13-foot-tall microscope offers magnification up to 10 million times, powerful enough to enlarge a single grain of Mississippi River silt to the size of Tiger Stadium.
LSU’s art-and-engineering ecosystem includes a Digital Twinning Studio, XR Studio, Digital Humans Lab, and Spatial Computing Lab.
A digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world system, place, or process that is connected to data and designed to change over time. Digital twins can represent things like buildings, equipment, or environments—even people.
Digital twins allow people to explore how systems work, test scenarios, and better understand complex relationships.
LSU’s digital twin team has been working with NASA to build a virtual replica of their vast Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans where the rockets for the ongoing Artemis mission are built using LSU National Center for Advanced Manufacturing equipment.
Digital twins can be used for training, research, planning, and decision-making, helping organizations experiment, learn, and improve without risk to the physical world.
In 2025, Syngenta, a science-based agriculture company with a key production site in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, partnered with LSU’s digital twin team to transform how digital twins are created for chemical processing facilities.
By providing X-rays and equipment, as well as expertise, Louisiana Light Source advances strong research programs on catalysts, minerals processing, and advanced materials at the frontier of scientific exploration.
LSU operates one of only six synchrotron facilities in the nation, and one of only two that are university-owned (Cornell’s CHESS is the other one) alongside the Department of Energy’s “big four.”
In 2026, LSU received a $20 million Mid-scale Research Infrastructure (MRI) award from the National Science Foundation to build LaNeXT, a laser-driven X-ray facility that will allow researchers to watch some of nature’s fastest processes as they happen.
LaNeXT will give researchers the ability to capture motion at the atomic and molecular level in billionths and quadrillionths of a second.
Powered by two Genesis Mission awards, LSU is working with Brookhaven National Laboratory, home of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, to optimize synchrotron operation across the nation using AI.
Since the 1980s, LSU’s Petroleum Engineering Research, Training & Testing (PERTT) Lab has evolved into a multi-million-dollar hub of innovation.
Trusted by global energy leaders such as ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron, the PERTT Lab is where cutting-edge ideas are field-tested and refined before deployment.
The industrial-scale PERTT Lab supports high-pressure, multiphase flow experimentation in field-scale tubulars, replicating real-world challenges in a controlled setting.
LSU is the only U.S. university with seven full-scale research and storage wells, offering a safe, field-realistic environment to evaluate and advance technologies in oilfield operations, carbon transport and storage, and pipeline systems.
The PERTT Lab’s new research well, drilled in the spring and summer of 2026, brings LSU’s total number of research wells to three, complemented by additional storage wells.
