Studies show that blasts of electrons from a particle accelerator are an effective way to clean up dirty water, nasty sewage sludge, and polluted gases from smokestacks. Now researchers need to make the technology more compact and reliable.
Science is often divided into two parts: the basic, knowledge-for-its-own-sake part and the applied, turn-it-into-products part. Accelerator physics straddles the pure and applied and provides a conduit for ideas to flow in both directions.
More than 18,000 industrial accelerators have been built over the last 50 years, with most still in use. They have a surprisingly broad range of applications, from manufacturing integrated circuits to modifying materials and creating high-energy X-rays.
A ski champ dreams of physics; the incredible shrinking cancer treatment; the Science Express packs 'em in; SLAC's brilliant mylar mirage; a happy clash of human ions; letters.
A summary of recent stories, published weekdays, in symmetry breaking, www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/
Worried about getting the experimental data they need to finish their PhDs, about two dozen graduate students have left the long-delayed Large Hadron Collider for experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron. Most say they won’t be gone for long.
Like surfers on a monster wave, electrons can ride waves of plasma to very high energies in a very short distance. Scientists have proven that plasma acceleration works. Now they’re developing it as a way to dramatically shrink the size and cost of particle accelerators for science, medicine, industry, and myriad other uses.
Robots, mummies, and giant jellyfish took over Chicago’s Millennium Park—just part of the fun at the latest LabFest, a kind of pumped-up, hands-on outdoor science fair.
Accelerator expert M. Stanley Livingston summarized worldwide advances in high-energy accelerators in a book published in 1954. A graphic in his book—the latest update is displayed here—has become a hallmark in the field of accelerator physics.
If you buy a Butterball turkey this Thanksgiving, you have particle accelerators to thank for its freshness. For decades now, industry has used particle accelerators to produce the sturdy, heat-shrinkable film that Butterballs and many other products come wrapped in.
Anticipating Twitter by five decades, physicist Clyde Wiegand placed a blackboard near the Bevatron’s entrance and posted daily updates on the group’s progress.
The Intensity Frontier is one of three broad approaches to particle physics research, each characterized by the tools it employs.
Meet Ketino Kaadze, Mark Cooke, and Martina Hurwitz, three graduate students who recently left experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider to work on data-producing experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron. See story.
Photos: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab.
Photo-illustration: Sandbox Studio.
Dec 2007
Scientists working on the Compact Muon Solenoid test the detector using particles that rain down from space...
Aug 2006
A fundamental particle predicted by theorist Peter Higgs, may be the key to understanding why elementary particles have mass...