Word: cyclotron
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...world's biggest cyclotron will be built on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Last week the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Chairman David E. Lilienthal, seconded happily by U. of C.'s Ernest O. Lawrence, announced that the Government will finance a vast machine (no feet in diameter) to dwarf all present atom-smashers. It will weigh more than 10,000 tons, cost $9 million...
...biggest cyclotron will be radically new in design. Its magnet will be a massive hollow ring with a vacuum chamber inside it. Driven by subtly timed electrical pushes, atomic particles will circle faster & faster around the chamber until their speed comes close to the speed of light. Berkeley scientists calculate that when a proton has circled around the chamber something over a million times, it will have six billion electron volts of energy...
...University of California admitted last week (after too many garbled rumors in the press) that it had created the first man-made meson. U.C. did it with its 4,000-ton cyclotron. The news caused a sizable flurry throughout the world of physics-for mesons are closely connected with the unknown force that holds matter together...
Mesons are mysterious, short-lived particles knocked out of .atomic nuclei. It takes a lot of punch to knock them out. Before the 4,000-ton cyclotron developed sufficient punch, the only mesons in captivity had been trapped in the wild. Dr. Carl Anderson of CalTech found their characteristic tracks in a cloud chamber. Other scientists found two types, heavy and light, in photographic plates exposed on high mountains. All had been formed by cosmic rays, the enormously powerful particles that strike down out of space. No man-pushed particle was strong enough to engender a single meson...
...great cyclotron at Berkeley is just barely strong enough. Dr. Eugene Gardner, 35, and Brazilian-born Dr. C.M.G. Lattes, 23, put a thin carbon target in a beam of alpha particles (helium nuclei) in the cyclotron chamber. Figuring that the alpha particles had enough power (380 million electron volts) to knock mesons out of the carbon atoms, Gardner & Lattes put a stack of special photographic plates at the spot where the mesons should hit. Then they turned on the cyclotron. When they developed the plates, they found the characteristic wavy tracks of negative mesons. Some of them ended in "stars...