Word: proton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world's most powerful atom smasher is in neither the U.S. nor in Russia; it is in Switzerland. In the rolling countryside three miles northwest of Geneva, the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) has built a great new proton synchrotron designed to produce 25 billion electron volts. Half buried in a hillside, it is a huge doughnut of magnet steel, 656 ft. in outside diameter. Last week British Physicist John B. Adams, chief of CERN's Proton Synchrotron Division, ordered slight corrections in the magnetic field, watched as the protons sped faster and faster around their circular...
...that found the long-sought antiprotons, key particles of the stranger-than-fiction world of antimatter (TIME, Oct. 31, 1955 et seq.). Antiprotons, which the Segre-Chamberlain team identified in a beam of subatomic debris created by Berkeley's 6.2-billion-volt bevatron, have the mass of ordinary protons but carry negative electric charges instead of positive charges. When a proton hits an antiproton, they annihilate each other, both turning into a powerful flash of gamma-ray energy...
Bondi, are backers of the theory of continuous creation, which holds that matter is still being created. The newly created matter is generally believed to appear throughout space in the form of hydrogen atoms (one proton and one electron each), but Gold and Hoyle now think it may first appear as neutrons. Since neutrons are unstable, they break up almost immediately, yielding equal numbers of protons and electrons. This neutron decay releases so much energy that the resulting "cosmological material" has the temperature...
...particle accelerator was a completely indispensable tool in our research," Chamberlain noted. Only one particle per 30,000 was an anti-proton, however, and the California scientists had to develop a complicated array of bending magnets, magnetic focusing lenses, and detectors to spot the rare particle...
...There is no direct practical application at the present time, however, for anti-matter," Chamberlain pointed out, "but the discovery will help us a great deal in understanding nuclear structure." Although no important discoveries have been made with the anti-proton in the last three years, he felt confident "important discoveries" would be made in the near future...