Word: beaming
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...Caro, 42, whose works suggest an explosion in a boiler factory. His Month of May, a star attraction at London's current sculpture triennial in Battersea Park, is a magenta, orange and green collection of huge aluminum jackstraws seemingly flung into the air over two chunks of I beam. There is no pedestal, no impressive volume filled with bronze-and no relation to human scale. "I wanted to make sculpture that is as meaningful in a room as a person," says Caro. So he shunned anatomically suggestive totems as "people substitutes" and made sculpture that substitutes things for people...
Backbone of Stanford's linear accelerator (called SLAC) is a 10,000-ft.-long, 4-in.-diameter copper tube housed in a concrete tunnel and buried 25 ft. underground to protect scientists and any bystanders from its fierce radiation. At one end, an electron beam is generated in much the same manner as the beam inside a home TV picture tube. Injected into a nickel-size hole that runs the length of the copper tube, the beam's electrons are immediately accelerated by 6,000,000-watt microwave pulses generated by 245 klystrons-giant, ultrahigh-frequency radio tubes...
...Beam Switchyard. For the remainder of the two-mile journey, most of the energy imparted to the electrons by the radio wave is in the form of mass. As a result, each electron increases its mass 40,000 times, and has acquired about 20 billion electron volts (BEV) of energy by the time it reaches the far end of the copper tube. There, the extremely powerful stream of charged particles passes through a beam "switchyard," where giant electromagnets direct it into one or another of two target buildings, or split it between both...
Inside the buildings, the electron beam is fired at targets such as metallic sheets or containers of liquid hydrogen. As a high-energy electron approaches the nucleus of an atom in the target, one of two things happens: it veers off in a different direction, or it actually shatters the nucleus-and the reaction often produces new and different particles that exist for only billionths of a second...
Subatomic World. Though SLAC's 20 BEV output is exceeded by the more familiar synchrotrons-devices that accelerate atomic particles by whirling them in a circular path-linear acceleration has several advantages. The beam is easier to control, more accessible for experimentation and bombards a target with more particles per second -increasing the probability of particle interaction. Even more important, circular accelerators cannot impart energies of more than about ten BEV to electrons which radiate away much of their energy when traveling in a circular path. Synchrotrons and other circular accelerators such as cyclotrons and betatrons are usually used...