Word: leps
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...understand why even Hawking was awed: he was looking at just a portion of the largest scientific instrument ever built. Known as the large electron-positron collider, this new particle accelerator is the centerpiece of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and one of Europe's proudest achievements. LEP is a mammoth particle racetrack residing in a ring- shaped tunnel 27 km (16.8 miles) in circumference and an average of 110 meters (360 ft.) underground. The machine contains 330,000 cubic meters (431,640 cu. yds.) of concrete and holds some 60,000 tons of hardware, including nearly...
...LEP and other large accelerators have been built to probe the nature of matter on a scale far smaller than that of the atom. The goal is to answer ancient and fundamental questions: What is the universe made of, and what are the forces that bind its parts together? These questions cannot be answered without an understanding of what happened in the Big Bang, the unimaginably hot and dense fireball that 15 billion years ago gave birth to the universe and all it contains...
This power to go back 15 billion years in time has touched off one of the most heated competitions in the history of science, a race that pits Europe's LEP against U.S. entries led by the powerful Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. Huge teams of physicists at the rival centers are working day and night to discover the next new particle and to explain the behavior of those already found. In recent years, each lab has had its share of triumphs...
...approach to accelerator design, sending the positrons and electrons down a two-mile-long straight track, then spinning them out in opposing semicircles before colliding them. The CERN machine is more conventional and thus more likely to work from the start. The positrons and electrons in the LEP are made to circle repeatedly in opposite directions through the tunnel, with new particles added periodically to the stream. In a given period of time, the LEP is expected to produce hundreds of times as many Z 0s as the Stanford collider does. That gives CERN the best odds of being...
Although CERN's staff tries to be diplomatic about competition with the U.S. in particle physics, there is little doubt that the LEP has given the Europeans a major advantage. "I don't think of science as a football game," says Ugo Amaldi, who oversees one of the LEP's detectors. "But if you look at the number of American scientists coming here, it is clear that our way of doing things is attracting interest...