Word: bevatrons
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McMillan's excitement went beyond the light experiment. Hundreds of technicians, engineers and scientists had worked since March at modifying the Berkeley Bevatron-which was designed for experiments with high-energy protons-to accelerate even heavier particles: nitrogen ions. As a result, McMillan announced at a press conference last week, nitrogen nuclei had been boosted to 36 billion electron volts, the highest energy level ever attained for such heavy particles in a laboratory...
Bare Nuclei. What the Bevatron apparatus had really done was create a kind of homemade cosmic ray, a big step in bringing the universe down to earth. Like cosmic rays from outer space, the particles shot through the Bevatron are really bare nuclei of atoms-in this case nitrogen-that have been stripped of their electrons and accelerated to tremendous velocities. By shooting these tiny bullets into a plastic target rich in hydrogen atoms, the Berkeley team was able to dissect the laboratory-produced cosmic rays. The collisions fragmented the nitrogen nuclei into every element lighter than nitrogen...
Scientists have no lack of chores for a machine with the capabilities of the Bevatron. Biophysicists, for example, are optimistic about using heavy ions, or other particles that can be made from these ions, to combat cancer, acromegaly (a rare disease in which facial features, hands and feet thicken) and Parkinson's disease. Unlike X rays and gamma rays, heavy particles do not damage healthy tissue on their way to a tumor; they do most of their deadly work only after reaching it. (Before the modification of the Bevatron, heavy ions could not be accelerated enough even to penetrate...
Brookhaven-Syracuse University study last summer in Geneva. Last week experimental teams on opposite coasts of the U.S. confirmed its existence. They used two of the world's largest atom smashers, Brookhaven's Synchrotron and Berkeley's Bevatron, to fire negatively charged K mesons into a hydrogen bubble chamber. After the mesons collided with hydrogen nuclei, the scientists found two K mesons that were the decay products of an even more ephemeral particle. It has a life span of just 2/1 0,000th of a billionth of a billionth of a second-or just long enough...
...five search parties in separate laboratories reported no luck. Then, under the leadership of Yugoslav Physicist Dr. Bodgan C. Maglic, scientists at the University of California's famed Lawrence Radiation Laboratory analyzed 2,500 photographs of the four-prong stars found when antiprotons shot from Berkeley's bevatron accelerator collide with protons in a bubble chamber. Each star shows four curved lines made by negative and positive pions (pi mesons) created by the collision. There seemed to be a slight chance that careful examination would show that in some cases some of the star lines were formed...