In a typical high school physics textbook, says scienceeducation specialist Beth Marchant, only the last chapter is devoted to all the developments since 1900–the stuff that physicists are actually working on today.
This August, one hundred and fifty postdocs and advanced graduate students from around the world will gather on the Illinois prairie to enhance their understanding of particle colliders at the CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School.
In pursuit of some of the most exciting science of our time, the Large Hadron Collider has pushed the boundaries of technology and the scale of science experiments to new extremes.
The Positron Electron Project (PEP) collider at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center produced its first collisions in 1979. All sorts of particles burst out, including the tau lepton, an ephemeral cousin of the electron.
After undergoing a buffered chemical polishing (BCP) treatment at Cornell University, the first US-processed and tested International Linear Collider superconducting cavity achieved a milestone accelerating gradient of 26 MV/m (megavolts per meter)–surpassing the first gradient goal (25 MV/m).
Welcome to SLAC's End Station B, where work on the International Linear Collider (ILC) will help shape the future of particle physics–although some inhabitants don't seem to give a hoot.