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Fermilab Antimatter Lab to Hold Limited Tours
chigun writes "Fermilab is shutting down its normal operations for maintenance for 9 weeks and during this time will be conducting tours of its facilities. The fact that they are the only people capable of producing antimatter is pretty cool as well."
They better be careful, nothing causes a spacial anomaly like a leak in anti-matter containment aboard a good-sized starship.
I'd wait to go until I make sure they have a good Antimatter Containment Field.
I wouldn't want to be on one of those episodes where they have to jettison the warp core.
Chris
yay! my first accepted /. post!
swanker than you
I have been through the CDF at Fermilab. It is an awe-inspiring experience to see a device, bigger than many houses, devoted to investigating the smallest and most fleeting events currently open to human inspection. The huge sliding shield doors which separate the beam line from the zones which are human-safe during operation will give you some idea of how big, and dangerous, small can be.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The tours are full - no more registrations are being accepted.
The answering machine on the phone number given in the Sun-Times article indicates that there is no more space available.
> The fact that they are the only people capable of producing antimatter is pretty cool as well.
:) And it was all produced on site! Were you talking about direct production?
:)
Could you elaborate on that ? I mean, as was mentionned in the article, positrons are used daily in the numerous PET clinics all over the world. In fact, I'm using some for an experiment right now (indirectly of course, since I'm using F18, which decays by emitting a positron
I'll have to read more on that I guess
Yeah, right! http://livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antim atter/factory/AM-factory00.html
The fact that they are the only people capable of producing antimatter is pretty cool as well.
Well not really a fact.
I remember experiements with positrons (anti-electrons) in undergraduate physics.
As for anti-protons, they can be produced at other places, ie CERN.
Just as long as when you're there, they don't cause a resonance cascade....
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
He might have meant anti-hydrogen, which IIRC isn't made anywhere else, or at least not in the quantities Fermilab makes.
Folks around the world have been producing antiparticles for quite some time. They're also created by natural processes, but don't last long in high matter density environments.
Credo sim. - I think I am.
I went to the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab Family Fun Day once. Really cool to tours the labs there. If you can go to one of these kinds of things I would highly recommend it.
but in Soviet Russia, Anti-Matter produces YOU!
You said that Fermilab was the only place where they can produce antimatter in the world, whereas really there are 7+ facilities worldwide that can do so. Any particle accelerator that can produce mesons is an antimatter producer (1/2 of all mesons produced at places like TRIUMF, RAL, PSI, or KEK are the antimatter form -- positive muons and pions, etc.)...
And if you really want to get legalistic, any place that can produce positrons (e.g., any hospital with a positron emission tomography (PET) program) is producing antimatter on a major scale!
CERN aren't american, so they don't count. The first _humans_ instead of sub-human european chimps, to produce antimatter, are the Fermilab guys.