Word: liquidates
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Russia. Physicist Luis Alvarez of the University of California last week held up a strange photograph that looked a little like a nonobjective drawing. It was in fact a picture of one of nature's innermost secrets. Made possible by use of California's new 6-ft. liquid hydrogen bubble chamber (TIME, July 13), it showed for the first time the birth, death and after effects of an anti-lambda particle...
...bubble-chamber picture (see cut), an antiproton from the Bevatron enters at bottom and hits a proton (1): out of the collision come one lambda and one anti-lambda particle. Since both are neutral electrically, they leave no tracks in the liquid hydrogen, but after a short, invisible career, each decays into track-leaving particles by which it can be identified. The lambda ( 2) turns into a proton and a negative pi meson, both of which go off the picture leaving strong curved tracks. The anti-lambda (3) turns into an antiproton and a positive pi meson. The positive...
...Luis Alvarez, associate director of the Radiation Lab, was not in the audience. He was at the White House delivering a strobo-scopic gadget he had invented to improve President Eisenhower's golf game. But Alvarez knew about the Glaser paper, and had plans for improvements. The best liquid to use, he thought, was not ether; it was pure liquid hydrogen, which contains no carbon or oxygen atoms to confuse researchers...
...Liquid hydrogen is rugged stuff to fool with, so cold (boiling point: -252.7° C. at atmospheric pressure) that steel cracks on sudden contact. It must be elaborately refrigerated or it will flash into vapor. Even a small leak is highly explosive. The 150 gal. in Berkeley's chamber have the explosive power...
...around like a mechanical dinosaur. Leak detectors were installed everywhere to watch for escaping hydrogen; 104 alarm circuits inside the machine flash lights, ring bells and honk horns at the slightest hint of trouble. In a serious emergency (e.g., the failure of the refrigeration system) the entire stock of liquid hydrogen can be dumped through a pipe down a canyon and into a spherical tank. If all precautions fail, a hydrogen explosion may not wreck the whole apparatus. The top of the building is made of mint green plastic, is designed to blow off easily, allowing the blast to spend...