The sun is shining; the Earth is warm instead of icy. Life is good, thanks to the weak force. One of the four known forces that shape the universe, the weak force sustains our lives, driving the nuclear reactions that power the sun and heat the Earth’s core. It’s also tremendously useful.
As physicists and engineers devise ways to make the International Linear Collider perform better at a lower cost, the design evolves, sometimes with tweaks but at other times with major reconfigurations.
Luis Alvarez, a physicist at what today is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, attended a 1953 meeting of the American Physical Society and heard a young University of Michigan physicist named Donald Glaser describe a particle detector he’d developed and called a “bubble chambe
The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) isn't scheduled to open until 2008, but the Tokai campus facility is already the site of discovery—just not of the physics variety.
Advances in virtual control technology have shown scientists just how important humans are after all. Although scientists can now essentially operate a particle collider from anywhere in the world, having members of a team work well remotely is just as significant a challenge.
As work continues to complete the Large Hadron Collider in Europe and plans develop around the world for an International Linear Collider, one accelerator at the energy frontier is open for business right now. At Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron collider is making discoveries.