Illinois Atom Smasher Gives Record-Breaking Performance
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago cranked up the country’s newest atom smasher Sunday and smacked matter against antimatter at record-breaking energies, a key step in mankind’s quest to understand nature.
The so-called Tevatron cyclotron, which whips protons and antiprotons around a four-mile ring 50,000 times a second before smashing them into each other, produced collisions at 1.6 trillion electron volts, three times greater than the energies produced at the CERN collider in Switzerland. CERN is a consortium of European nations.
The event, which came during an engineering test of the Tevatron, gives Fermilab, as the facility is known, and the United States a leg up in the international competition for discoveries in physics. CERN scientists in Geneva won last year’s Nobel Prize for their discoveries with their machine, which has now been eclipsed.
Funded by Energy Dept.
Fermilab is funded by the Department of Energy and operated by a consortium of 10 universities and three national laboratories.
The successful test of the Tevatron also gives Fermilab an advantage in the domestic competition to build the next generation of atom smashers, the so-called Superconducting Supercollider, which will be 60 to 100 miles in circumference. The current ring at Fermilab is four miles in circumference.
Sunday’s test came after seven years of construction and a month of fiddling with the machine to get it right. For the first time, the scientists were able to get a beam of protons and antiprotons spinning around the ring in opposite directions at 800 billion electron volts each.
The key to the machine is the superconducting magnets that hold the particles in the ring while they are being whipped around without touching the walls. The centrifugal force of particles traveling at 99.99% the speed of light is enormous.
Deep Mysteries Probed
The test required the use of the machine’s antiproton source, a smaller ring where the antimatter is created. There is also a detector that will enable scientists to study what happened when the beams collided, information that they hope will help them answer deep mysteries at the foundation of physics.
The knowledge is not expected to have any practical applications in the foreseeable future.
“Our ultimate goal is to look for new phenomena that can explain why certain particles are so massive,” said John Peoples, project manager of the Tevatron, by telephone from Batavia, Ill., site of Fermilab.
The standard model of physics says all forces are the same, but the particles that carry the forces have tremendously different masses. “How can something that’s supposed to be the same be so different?” Peoples asked.
“Our goal is to understand the physics,” he said.
