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.
Have you ever tossed a ball at a wall, playing a game of one-man catch? As you tossed that ball again and again and again, have you ever thought about the chance that it could go right through the wall? According to quantum mechanics, this is a real possibility.
Street banners honoring nine of Berkeley Lab's Nobel Prize winners, originally installed along Telegraph Avenue in 2003, have been mounted on poles on Cyclotron Road leading to Berkeley Lab in honor of its 75th anniversary.
Mesons. Bosons. Pions. Muons. Asparagus. Yes, asparagus. Physicists have spare time, too, and a few of them spend it in Fermilab's Garden Club, with roots almost as old as the lab itself.
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.
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).
Over a half-eaten burrito or a bowl of spaghetti, Sam Ehrenstein ponders the unanswered questions of fundamental physics. Yet Sam is no experimental physicist or postdoc brooding over his data. Not yet, anyway.
Along the Loop Road at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the roar of falling water and a refreshing mist filled the air after six solid weeks of California rain. But the water cascading down the inside of Campus Cooling Tower 101, and landing in a frothy pool, is hardly scenic.
Neutron scattering research has improved the quality of many everyday items: Shatter-proof windshields, credit cards, pocket calculators, airplanes, compact discs, and magnetic storage tapes are just some examples.
Physics has demonstrated that the everyday phenomena we experience are governed by universal principles applying at time and distance scales far beyond normal human experience.
In October 2003, I gave an evening talk at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The subject was nature on the familiar scale, the kind embodied in the restored prairie on the Fermilab campus–some 1200 acres of compass plant and rattlesnake master and other species.
The sighting of Jupiter's moons by Galileo Galilei resonates through science and history. Using a handmade telescope in January 1610, Galileo confirmed the Copernican theory that the planets moved around the sun; the Earth was not the center of the solar system.
Clouds of electrons could block the view of new discoveries at the proposed ILC, a multi-billion-dollar particle collider. Eliminating those clouds is critical to the prspects for the machine's success.
