When the Bevatron switched on at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the fall of 1954, it was the largest particle accelerator ever built, capable of producing energies upwards of six billion electronvolts.
I'm a Manga reader and a physics student. When relating my ideas to non-physics students, I had a hard time. Once I asked a cartoonist to draw a figure that would impersonate a particle, which I described to him.
The blue team rounded the bend first—sweaty, jovial, and headed toward the halfway point of the 2.4-mile path circling Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Suddenly, from the other direction, the yellow team emerged.
A visitor wandering around SLAC last July would be forgiven for thinking the hot California sun had triggered a mirage. A parking lot at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource had transformed into a glistening lake.
She could take her pick of extreme adventures—rock climbing, skydiving, trekking through some exotic wilderness. The Swiss TV show Sportpanorama gave Dominique Gisin, winner of two International Ski Federation World Cup downhill victories in 2009, the chance to do anything she'd like.
Physicists have been inventing new types of accelerators to propel charged particles to higher and higher energies for more than 80 years. Today, scientists estimate that more than 17,000 accelerators are in operation around the world—in industry, in hospitals, and at research institutions.
In August, robots, mummies, and giant jellyfish took over Chicago's Millennium Park. Fortunately, the invasion was peaceful—just part of the fun at the latest LabFest, a kind of pumped-up, hands-on outdoor science fair aimed to engage Chicagoans in the excitement of science.
Like surfers on monster waves, electrons can ride waves of plasma to very high energies in a very short distance. Scientists have proven that plasma acceleration works.
Studies show that blasts of electrons from a particle accelerator are an effective way to clean up dirty water, nasty sewage sludge, and polluted gases from smokestacks. Now researchers need to make the technology more compact and reliable.
Worried about getting the experimental data they need to finish their PhDs, about two dozen graduate students have left the long-delayed Large Hadron Collider for experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron. Most of them say they won't be gone for long.
In a recent commentary ("Bosons and grocery bags", symmetry May 09), Fermilab Director Pier Oddone pointed out that most Americans dont recognize accelerators, such as those used for medical therapy, as valuable by-products of particle physics research.
Science is often divided into two parts: the basic, knowledge-for-its-own-sake part and the applied, turn-it-into-products part. This is a division convenient for structuring organizations and funding processes, but doesnt reflect the real world.