Word: fermilab
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...scene last week, reminiscent of a locker-room victory celebration, marked a more esoteric kind of triumph. When the green line made its telltale movement at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the sprawling high-energy physics research center outside Chicago, it signified a major scientific achievement. At that instant, Fermilab's newly rebuilt accelerator (physicists prefer that term to atom smasher) climbed to 512 billion electron volts (GeV),* the highest energy level ever reached by the powerful machines used by physicists to study the fundamental secrets of matter...
...record, to be sure, was only a minor increase over Fermilab's existing capability. In 1976, five years after its completion, the accelerator hit 500 GeV and has been operating close to that level ever since. But the jubilant scientists nonetheless had reason to celebrate. The test meant that years of work had finally paid off and that the $130 million set aside to make the machine the most complex accelerator ever built had really been well spent. In the months ahead, it will gradually be boosted to 800 GeV and perhaps by next year to a trillion electron...
...ancient Greeks needed only their powerful intellects and imaginations to postulate atoms as the basic building blocks of matter. Today, more than ever before, such exploration requires complicated machines like Fermilab's Tevatron. By pummeling the nucleus, the atom's central mass, with protons or other subatomic particles, physicists can literally tear apart the fabric of matter, somewhat like peeling layers from an onion. Every peel, however, requires increasingly powerful and costlier machines. As Stanford Physicist Wolfgang Panofsky notes, "The smaller the objects, the bigger the microscope we must use to see them...
...findings at the other end of those searching instruments have excited the entire scientific world. In the past four years, Fermilab's major overseas rivals, notably CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), located outside Geneva, have discovered a group of new particles that helps confirm what physicists call the standard model. This divides matter into two basic types of particles: quarks, which are the building blocks of protons, neutrons and other "heavy" components of the atomic nucleus; and leptons, exemplified by "light" particles like the electron...
...also irritated American scientists, who had regarded themselves as the world champions in high-energy physics. Ironically, the leader of the successful CERN experiment, who may win a Nobel Prize, was Italian Physicist Carlo Rubbia, a faculty member at Harvard. He had originally proposed it to Fermilab, which decided to concentrate on the new machine instead...