Word: electronized
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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...
SLAC's electrons, with about three times as much energy as generated in the next most powerful electron accelerator, should produce new and revealing glimpses of the subatomic world by their reactions with atomic nuclei. SLAC has also been designed for the eventual addition of another 715 klystrons, which would increase its energy level to 40 BEV, exceeding even the output of Brookhaven National Laboratory's 33 BEV proton-accelerating synchrotron, currently the world's most powerful accelerator...
...exposure provided the minimum energy needed to cause the reaction. They then determined the energy carried by a photon at that wave length and calculated how much of it had been imparted to the deuterium atom when the deuterium iodide molecule was split. Their result: one-third of an electron volt...