Unifying photonics and accelerator physics is essential for the development of future accelerators, free electron lasers, and other scientific instruments due to increasingly synergistic advances at the cross‑section between these two fields. Laser fields are ideal agents to tailor the 6-D phase-space distribution of electron beams because they can imprint correlations with extremely high spatio-temporal precision. The Lasers for Accelerators (L4A) team serves existing facilities and disciplines at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University by bringing together experts from various backgrounds in photon sciences and accelerator physics to create integrative scientific and technological advancements in quantum and nonlinear optics, accelerators, and bright x-ray sources.