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Pictorial Tour of World's Longest Linear Accelerator
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 if Man or Astro-man will come out of cryostasis to compose an ode to the new electron laser. Their song for the two-mile linear particle accelerator pretty much nailed it.
I'm tagging this songofthetwomilelinearparticleacceleratorstanforduniversity.
Badass Resumes
Now, when are we going to get the moon-sized space station to put it on?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Its really a shame that SLAC just had to lay off something like 15% of their staff due to DOE budget cuts in the past couple of weeks.
Too bad the Superconducting Supercollider project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider went bust. 'Twould have been glorious.
...which merely leaves you going in circles.
Though I suspect the taxi driver was padding the fare.
I mean, that whole pictorial is just screen captures from Halflife.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Our accelerator is longer.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Yeah that was also an interesting article, my photo editor pointed it out to me after we had wrapped up the captioning process. I think we saw a somewhat different side of SLAC (although we got the klystron gallery shot of course)
-- sigs suck --
although it is pointless, i cant resist the urge to mention this would make a perfect death ray machine in a james bond movie.
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.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
Ladies and gentalmen, I give you the worlds most advanced bong...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Picture 8 has a description that starts with: "Your microwave oven has a klystron inside" which is wrong. All modern microwave ovens have a cavity magnetron inside not a klystron.
I worked at slac for some 6 months and i remember them telling me they solved the big bang during the interview and they could see sub atomic particles visually. It was a pretty cool place, with posters from the 60's all over the place that had been there since the 60's. I actually worked with the guy who made the first cgi-script web page and he was telling me about mosaic how you had to cut and paste the link into the location adress instead of clicking on it. There was also a very weird office with all kinds of interesting old posters and I remember a book titled "quantum mechanics" by messiah. They also had a room labeled "Retire" that had a bed in it for taking naps, of which I did utilize. Seems as if they fill up an oracle grid cluster full of data from the detectors and mine the data to figure out how it all works. They were the slowest most laid back people I've ever seen. Just getting a white board installed was a long process that went through the carpentry department. I found it interesting how the buildings are laided out as the computing center is between the cooling tower and cryogenics. When they were upgrading the hvac systems the computing center looked like one big computer with huge manual fans at each entrance and we weren't allowed to move fans without the permission of the HVAC people. Also we'd always seem to know when power outages were going to happen ahead of time. I think SLAC uses more of California's power than anywhere else (some 1/16 or more) and they have the fastest interntet connection in the world, but at the desktop its a slow 10MB.
M
Am I the only one who feels that the authors treated Johnny on a callous and cruel manner?
Feynman used to visit his sister in neighboring Palo Alto. He dropped by SLAC one day, "just to snoop around" and by chance, was shown a graph that no one quite knew what to make of. It was somewhat bell-shaped but the parameters that had gone into its construction were obscure - the only one who had a good handle on it was Bjorken and few were smart enough to understand what he was saying. Besides, he was just a grad student speaking in terms of current algebra, a language few understood at the time. The experimenters were hoping Feynman could explain the graph's significance.
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.
[+] science, technology, lookicanmakemytaglongerthananyotheraslongasitypeuptothelimit, itssodanotpop, songofthetwomilelinearparticleacceleratorstanforduniversity (tagging beta)
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?
Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator...are currently amassing the first scientific evidence that there is more matter than antimatter in the universe
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.
......a cavity magnetron inside not a klystron......
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.....
All theory is gray
.....wires and tubes left dragging everywhere.........
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.
All theory is gray