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.
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.
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.
