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Pictorial Tour of World's Longest Linear Accelerator
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Feb 18, 2008 03:31 PM
from the always-with-the-measuring-contest dept.
from the always-with-the-measuring-contest dept.
Wired has a great pictorial tour of their recent visit to Stanford University's linear accelerator, the longest in the world. The accelerator has been the vehicle upon which three Nobel Prizes were earned and a the next big project will boast an electron laser roughly 10 billion times more powerful than existing x-ray sources.
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I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
A spectrum of infinite scale (Score:3, Funny)
OK, we've got -part- of it (Score:3, Funny)
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SLAC is great, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:SLAC is great, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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I would be interested in hearing fro
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Well, it is when you consider that the money is being wasted on useless wars.
On the other hand, given a limited overall science budget, it is doubtful to me that physics mega-projects should continue being supported in the way they have been. Biology, chemistry, math, and computer science yield a lot more useful results per dollar.
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Well, it is when you consider that the money is being wasted on useless wars.
On the other hand, given a limited overall science budget, it is doubtful to me that physics mega-projects should continue being supported in the way they have been. Biology, chemistry, math, and computer science yield a lot more useful results per dollar.
Well, okay, maybe Congress found it necessary to cut $88 million out of the high energy physics budget to pay for Bush's useless wars. Sure, I could probably that.
But if that's so, then how the hell did the same Congress find it possible to lard $19 BILLION of new earmarks (a.k.a. pork) into the budget?!?
If they could cut back the Bridge to Nowhere and other pork by just 5%, then there would be more than enough money for SLAC, Fermilab, etc. But instead of cutting wasteful pork by only 5%, they choose to
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And the rest of the money comes from where? The tooth fairy? Bush's war probably costs a trillion dollars when all is said and done.
But if that's so, then how the hell did the same Congress find it possible to lard $19 BILLION of new earmarks (a.k.a. pork) into the budget?!?
Most of the money you call "pork" is infrastructure spending. There may
I for one.. (Score:2)
Bob [subgenius.com] would be proud.
tm
Superconducting Supercollider (Score:3, Interesting)
MUCH better than the CERN tour... (Score:5, Funny)
Though I suspect the taxi driver was padding the fare.
Man, those budget cuts are rough. (Score:5, Funny)
Enjoyed the tour... (Score:1)
Cool now I can see how accurate my story is (Score:1, Flamebait)
I interviewed for a job once at SLAC, but barely remember enough of it to know if the beginnings of my my short story [storymash.com] featuring SLAC are vaguely accurate. It seems that they were using Amiga computers when I was there and searching for the W particle.
I don't know, I suppose it is the 0 dimensional particle thought to exist at the core of Bush's brain?
Take that, Berkeley! (Score:3, Funny)
Our accelerator is longer.
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AND the dont have a fucking tree as a mascot.
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While FELs are able to create light pulses billion times more brilliant, they are not brighter.
In fact, for most experiments, this creates more problems than solutions:
- XPS is near impossible because of the high charge density of the ionisation cloud (acceleration after emission warps the whole spectra)
- tomography suffers from the destructive pulse behaviour (few application outside molecular tomography have simple enough system
though pointless (Score:4, Funny)
I'm also pretty sure it would make a cooler death ray than a linear accelerator, which, when you look at it, serves no purpose in world domination.
lastly but not least, the controls looks like the computers salvaged from the "2001 - a space odyssey" mission.
Bong? (Score:5, Funny)
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Microwave ovens do *NOT* have a klystron inside. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Microwave ovens do *NOT* have a klystron inside (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed correct, but each these klystrons has a large magnet associated with it. Also, there are only about 400 of them, not 4000 as in the article. SLAC never did much with protons, as was stated, but accelerates and collides anti-electrons, commonly called positrons with electrons. In the beginning, the electrons however were all directed against fixed targets.
The accelerator is perfectly STRAIGHT but not level. The injector end is about 50 feet higher than the target end. So, the Klystron Gallery does have a slope also.
I was there in the group at the ground breaking. Starting down on the Stanford University campus, I participated in the design and construction of power and control systems for magnets in the beam switch yard. We all had big celebration in 1967, upon getting an electron beam all the way through that 3/4 inch 2 mile long hole in that copper pipe. Sigh.... those were the days.....
Parent
Crazy tag (Score:2, Insightful)
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Working at SLAC (Score:5, Interesting)
M
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That's because the computer building is fed from the same beam switchyard power substation. Often when the large power supplies that ran the big magnets needed maintenance or reconfiguring for new experiments, they had to kill the feed to that substation.
On hot summer days, the accelerator was often shut down, so the silicon valley air conditioners could still run. I believe the wind tunnels at NASA/Ames in Mt.
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Poor Johnny! (Score:2, Insightful)
Richard Feynman Was There (Score:5, Interesting)
Feynman looked at the curve, went back to his motel for the night and came back the next day thoroughly excited because he'd deciphered the curve. The curve was showing the momentum transfer that occurred when the electrons coming out of the accelerator slammed into the quarks at the atom's core. He described the point-like quarks as looking like slow moving pancakes due to the electron's relativistic speed.
That accidental encounter broke a mental logjam at SLAC and enabled them to get a handle on what their new machine was producing - evidence that the quark was real. Up until that point, most of them had been in Murray Gellman's thrall. Gellman had insisted that quarks were mathematical scaffolding that didn't have any physical counterparts. Feynman's insight at SLAC proved otherwise and gave the experimenters mental hooks that enabled them to figure out what was going on with their machine.
Feynman later said the Bjorken and he were saying the same thing - he had just chosen different words to express the idea.
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For the benefit of those who think "Dolly" when they hear "Parton", the parent artice is presumably talking about the parton model [wikipedia.org], devised by Feynman to explain some high-energy collision results; as the article says, eventually the partons Feynman talked about were identified with the quarks [wikipedia.org] that Gell-Mann [wikipedia.org] and Zweig [hhttp] proposed, and the gluons [wikipedia.org] that bind them together in hardons^Whadrons [wikipedia.org]. (Oh, and "Bjorken" is James Bjorken [wikipedia.org].)
Weird Tags (Score:3, Funny)
Do I have to submit a few stories as "I Don't Believe in Ridiculous Tags" to make a point, or will this behavior self-correct before then?
A few corrections... (Score:3, Insightful)
That is just plain wrong. They are studying CP violation which is the difference between matter and anti-matter this might help to explain the huge excess of matter over antimatter that astronomers already observe in the Universe but it is known the the effects we understand today with B and K mesons (which is what they are studying) cannot explain it by itself.
Secondly they are NOT the first to observe CP violation by a long shot. It was first discovered in Kaons by Christenson, Cronin, Fitch and Turlay at Brookhaven in 1964 a discovery for which they won the Nobel prize.
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Well, perhaps more precisely, it's the difference between matter and anti-matter as a whole - the difference between a particular bit of matter and the particular corresponding bit of anti-matter is that their quantum numbers, such as charge, are inverted (so that, for example, a particle with charge N has an anti-particle with charge -N). It was originally thought that if you had some physical interaction between particl
Wow (Score:2)
SLAC to become SNLAC one day (Score:2)
To see what happened to another linear structure as a result of an earthquake on the San Andreas, go here [exploratorium.edu].
So, when SLAC b
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Valve Software's?
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what about Cern? (Score:2)
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Keep in mind that these are short term experiments, not long term, installations. The more permanent parts of the accelerator itself are much more orderly, just as in a good data center.