Pictorial Tour of World's Longest Linear Accelerator 79
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.
I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
SLAC is great, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Superconducting Supercollider (Score:3, Interesting)
Working at SLAC (Score:5, Interesting)
M
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.
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.....
Re:Working at SLAC (Score:3, Interesting)
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. View could suck up more peak power, but SLAC was definitely champion in the number of megawatt hours consumed because it ran many more hours.
I still remember the day TWO big semi-trucks came and we all watched them haul the IBM 90 mainframe to the recycling center. They then had 370s to take their place. Now, an iPhone has more computing capability.