Word: tevatron
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...example, giant particle accelerators require extremely powerful magnets to keep the particles confined to a circular track as they move at nearly the speed of light. At Fermilab, near Chicago, the world's most powerful accelerator, known as Tevatron, uses more than 1,000 superconducting magnets cooled with liquid helium at a cost of $5 million a year. But the efficiency of the magnets saves Fermilab an estimated $185 million annually in electric energy costs. The superconducting super collider, a mammoth accelerator 52 miles in circumference, endorsed last month by President Reagan for completion in the 1990s at a projected...
...machine the most complex accelerator ever built had really been well spent. In the months ahead, it will gradually be boosted to 800 GeV and perhaps by next year to a trillion electron volts (TeV). At full operating power, the device will not only live up to its name, Tevatron (from the Greek teras, or monster, a scientific symbol for a trillion), but will also put the U.S. back in the forefront of high-energy physics. Says Fermilab Director Leon Lederman: "The Tevatron is a leapfrog. If we hadn't done it, our program would have been seriously compromised...
...ancient Greeks needed only their powerful intellects and imaginations to postulate atoms as the basic building blocks of matter. Today, more than ever before, such exploration requires complicated machines like Fermilab's Tevatron. By pummeling the nucleus, the atom's central mass, with protons or other subatomic particles, physicists can literally tear apart the fabric of matter, somewhat like peeling layers from an onion. Every peel, however, requires increasingly powerful and costlier machines. As Stanford Physicist Wolfgang Panofsky notes, "The smaller the objects, the bigger the microscope we must use to see them...
...Tevatron should help right the transatlantic balance. Like Fermilab's existing accelerator, in whose tunnel it was built, the new machine is a giant four-mile-long circular particle race track, capable of whipping protons to within a shade of 186,000 miles per sec., the speed of light. When these high-velocity particles strike a target, for example, a metal bar, they shatter its component atoms, resulting in a burst of subatomic debris. Some of these particles are so ephemeral that they survive for only minute fractions of a second; from the trail they leave in detection devices...