Word: subnuclear
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...usually by smashing apart nuclei of atoms in huge accelerators. Most of the particles live for only a tiny fraction of a second before they decay into more stable atomic components Like electrons. Until now, all of these particles have occupied predictable places in what physicists jocularly call their subnuclear "zoo." The puzzling new discovery is a total misfit...
Except for the space program, there is hardly a costlier quest in all of science than exploration of the inner universe of the atom. To peer more deeply into that hidden world-in which more than 100 strange subnuclear particles have already been discovered -scientists have been forced to build ever more powerful atom smashers. Trouble is, the cost of such monsters is now so high-$250 million, for example, for the 500-billion-electron-volt (BeV) accelerator now nearing completion at Batavia, Ill.-that high-energy physicists are anxiously looking for alternate ways of getting a bigger bang...
...higher energy would come from the collision of two moving subnuclear particles--an electron and a positron. Normal accelerator experiments send a particle into a stationary target. But these cohisions, Pipkin said, can only take place in a "ring" where both particles are stored--which could cost as much as $16 million to build. The CEA instead would make a giant storage ring out of its accelerator by adding an injector for positrons to the present one for electrons. The two particles would rotate in opposite directions. At a given point the two streams could be made to collide...
Investigators are still trying to determine the exact cause of the blast. The accelerator, buried 16 ft. below ground, was not damaged, and there was no danger of radioactivity. Still, the laboratory's new bubble chamber for the study of subnuclear particles lay twisted and scorched in the $1,000,000 wreckage. When all the evidence has been studied, the deceptively simple element may yet be exonerated. But significantly, when the accident occurred, the scientists were cautiously handling hydrogen, piping it into the 100-gal. bubble chamber...
...been instrumental in developments ranging from exotic new metals to important new discoveries in superconductivity. Liquid hydrogen came into its own when it was put to use in bubble chambers for experiments in high-energy physics. In such studies, accelerators smash the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, scattering subnuclear debris through the bubble chamber, where scientists can follow and photograph the paths of the tiny charged particles by their tracks of small bubbles. This technique, which was to have been used at Cambridge, has led to the discovery and identification of many new particles...