Photo: Diana Rogers, SLAC
Busloads of new Stanford graduates and their families admired the field of golden grass on SLAC's eastern-most hill on a sunny Saturday in May. But their stunned tour guides looked in dismay as they sought 50 bright red balloons.
As the Global Design Effort for the proposed International Linear Collider starts to take shape, an international collaboration of scientists simultaneously works on an alternative linear collider technology that pushes physics and engineering to the edge.
The International Linear Collider is a proposed new electron-positron collider. Together with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, it would allow physicists to explore energy regions beyond the reach of today's accelerators.
The 1940s saw the origins of linear electron accelerators that directly led to the 2-mile-long accelerator at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. SLAC archivist Jean Deken presents a pictorial history of early linear accelerator development at Stanford University.
Whether climbing trees with her eight-year-old son Isaac, trying to put a dress on her four-year-old daughter Sonia, or running tests on the MINOS neutrino beam line, Debbie Harris is a problem solver and her mind is always busy. "It's really hard to be a parent," she says.
The future of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center involves a broadening from traditional particle physics experiments to research from subatomic to cosmological scales.
The most-cited paper in theoretical particle physics in 2004 was "A large mass hierarchy from a small extra dimension" by Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum, published in Physical Review Letters in 1999.
Tomorrow's particle physics experiments are redrawing the map for scientific collaboration. Although the field has long been accustomed to large groups of scientists, life in the new CERN collaborations will surely be different.
