Word: smashers
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...huge National Accelerator Laboratory at Batavia, Ill. Crowds of curious spectators hovered anxiously around the main control room, watching the meters and oscilloscope screens. On the screens, a narrow band of light-representing the electrical energy in a beam of speeding subatomic particles inside the atom smasher's doughnut-shaped tunnel-edged toward a telltale marking. The room became strangely silent. Then someone exclaimed, "There it is!" and wild cheering broke...
...assembled scientists and technicians had every reason for jubilation. After many plaguing problems, the world's largest atom smasher had reached its programmed energy level of 200 billion electron volts (GeV).* That was not only the most powerful beam ever achieved by an accelerator, but also far surpassed the former record achieved by the Russians in their 76 GeV machine outside Moscow. Just back from congressional appropriations hearings in Washington, NAL'S beleaguered director, Physicist Robert R. Wilson, happily passed out champagne in goblets saved for the occasion and emblazoned with...
...measure, Batavia's builders had decided not to air-condition the main tunnel of the $250 million machine. As a result, warm, humid air seeped into the tunnel last summer, and water condensed inside the coils of the 1,000 giant magnets that bend and focus the atom smasher's proton "bullets" as they race around this circular race track at speeds close to that of light. Shorted out by the moisture, some 300 magnets weighing up to twelve tons had to be repaired, resealed or replaced...
Apart from ISR, all atom smashers rely on the same basic principle: subatomic particles-usually protons-are accelerated to high velocities and slammed at stationary targets. Upon impact, the nuclei in the target atoms break apart, scattering the fragments for physicists to observe. This "bash-and-see approach" has drawbacks. As an accelerator's bullets approach the speed of light, the strange effects predicated by the relativity theory begin to take a toll: the proton's mass becomes much larger than that of the stationary targets. Much of the proton's energy is spent simply in pushing...
...economizing technique has now been put to work by imaginative scientists of the 12-nation European nuclear research center (CERN) outside Geneva. It is incorporated in a remarkable, new and relatively low cost ($80 million) atom smasher called ISR (for Intersecting Storage Rings) that has broken all existing energy records...