Word: fermilab
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Long a dream of the American particle-physics community, an accelerator the size of the proposed SSC would be 20 times as powerful as any now existing. It would dwarf the major U.S. accelerators -- Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., and another at Stanford University -- and would surpass even Europe's CERN collider, near Geneva. Formally endorsed by Ronald Reagan last January, the project is what Energy Secretary John Herrington calls a "momentous leap forward" in the exploration of matter and energy...
...example, giant particle accelerators require extremely powerful magnets to keep the particles confined to a circular track as they move at nearly the speed of light. At Fermilab, near Chicago, the world's most powerful accelerator, known as Tevatron, uses more than 1,000 superconducting magnets cooled with liquid helium at a cost of $5 million a year. But the efficiency of the magnets saves Fermilab an estimated $185 million annually in electric energy costs. The superconducting super collider, a mammoth accelerator 52 miles in circumference, endorsed last month by President Reagan for completion in the 1990s at a projected...
...measure the probability of particle collisions in an accelerator. Other CERN researchers arrived at a contrary conclusion. But Rubbia, convinced he was right, opposed publication of their work. The competition turned out to be correct. In the mid-1970s, Rubbia collaborated with two Americans in an experiment at Fermilab, near Chicago, on interactions of ghostly particles called neutrinos, and drew an interpretation that the team's underlings considered dubious. Rubbia publicly hailed the work as an important breakthrough; others later proved him wrong...
...several locations around a track, the particles are either smashed into metallic targets or steered to collide head-on with one another. Most of the new machines opt for the collision technique, which produces more energy. Explains Alvin Tollestrup, a Fermilab physicist: "It's the difference between a semi crashing into a small car and two semis crashing head-on." Some of the tremendous energy of those impacts is fleetingly transformed into strange particles that are thought to have existed in the very first moments of the universe. Before the unstable fragments decay back into energy and more familiar bits...
...conceived, the accelerator would generate energies of 40 trillion electron volts, in contrast to the 640 billion electron volts produced by CERN's SPPS accelerator. More impressive still, it would produce collisions 20 times as powerful as the generation of big machines now under construction at CERN, Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Whizzing past each other, the SSC's two opposing beams, consisting of closely packed bunches of about 10 billion protons each, would complete about 3,000 laps a second. In four to six places around the ring, the beams would intersect, producing up to 100 million...