The Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab set a world record on Sunday afternoon, July 3, 1983, achieving a beam energy of 512 billion electronvolts (GeV). Accelerator operators had made the first-ever attempt at accelerating a beam in the Tevatron at 3:12 a.m. that day, reaching 250 GeV.
Quick, give an example of a first name of a physicist. Albert? Benjamin? Sure, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin are famous examples. But their first names are rather unusual.
The Stanford Linear Accelerator pumps large amounts of energy into beams of electrons and positrons, sending them into the PEP-II storage ring where the particles can collide, revealing the secrets of fundamental particle processes.
Sometimes it takes the most impressive equipment in the world to find the smallest, most easily overlooked particles in the universe. Fermilab's Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) project is a perfect example.
During a recent trip to CERN on the Franco-Swiss border, my fellow International Linear Collider communicators and I gathered in the cafeteria for tea and coffee.
Here they measure the time not in minutes or hours. Instead they think in terms of how many antiprotons are ready to stack and how soon the Tevatron will be ready to accept new beam. Or how fast they need to fix something, any time of the day or night. Or how long they can stay awake.
