Word: fermilab
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This power to go back 15 billion years in time has touched off one of the most heated competitions in the history of science, a race that pits Europe's LEP against U.S. entries led by the powerful Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. Huge teams of physicists at the rival centers are working day and night to discover the next new particle and to explain the behavior of those already found. In recent years, each lab has had its share of triumphs...
...CAPTION: Fermilab's Tevatron...
...Fermilab. The machine most likely to find the top quark first is Fermilab's mighty Tevatron, which has been operating for 6 1/2 years beneath the waving grasses of the Illinois prairie. In the Tevatron, strong magnets guide subatomic particles through a circular tunnel that is 6.4 km (4 miles) in circumference. The accelerator is built as a ring so that particles can go around the track again and again, picking up speed with each lap. The ring was built large so that the particles would not have to make sharp turns...
That is not to say that the U.S. is second rate. The Tevatron, an accelerator at Fermilab, near Chicago, that smashes together protons and antiprotons, is still the most powerful collider in the world, and the proposed superconducting supercollider, planned for Texas, will be more powerful still. Proton-antiproton collisions entail more energy than electron- positron collisions and thus are more likely to generate previously undiscovered particles. But proton-antiproton impacts generate more subatomic debris, which makes it harder to study the properties of individual particles carefully. For what Amaldi calls "precision physics," Europe could soon...
...extremely concentrated energy bursts by using its magnets to guide protons, moving at nearly 186,000 miles per second, around the enormous ring in opposite directions. Then they would be forced to collide. The major difference between the SSC and the largest accelerator that currently exists -- the Tevatron, at Fermilab near Chicago -- is size and, therefore, power. The SSC would produce some 20 times as much energy as the Tevatron can and would generate correspondingly more interesting particles. Among the discoveries are certain to be some surprises. Says Harvard physicist Roy Schwitters, who is a leading candidate...