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Golden Age for Particle Hunters
| Article
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10073 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
3,230 Words |
| Author
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C. M. Plummer
Chris Plummer is a free-lance writer from Gloucester,
Virginia. She primarily writes in the marine, maritime, and
physical science fields. |
Scientists are calling the 1980s another "golden age" of physics. They liken it to the 1930s when new atomic theories and machines to test these theories proliferated. Present theories concern the nucleus, the heart of the atom. The newest machines, giant particle accelerators, are among the most complex research tools ever devised.
Fifty years after the first accelerators, popularly called "atom smashers," began to break up atoms and reveal their components, the newest accelerators are breaking up some of these components, protons and neutrons, to reveal ever more miniscule particles. Not since the giants of the 1930s--Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, and others--fascinated the public and, by their example, attracted many gifted students into physics careers, has there been such a proliferation of discoveries and influx of young scientists.
The race to design and build equipment capable of testing the newest theories requires constant upgrading of the older accelerators and the building of new ones. In the United States, Fermilab in Illinois has nearly finished expanding its capabilities with construction of the "Tevatron," an accelerator which uses superconducting magnets to boost protons to about 1 trillion electron volts (TeV) of energy. In Newport News, Virginia, a new "world class facility" called the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) is in the design stage. The Stanford (California) Linear Accelerator, one of the oldest of the big machines, was upgraded a year ago.
In the 1950s the field of high energy (or particle) physics split off from nuclear physics. Today these two fields are converging again, as both their experimental needs and methods and their conclusions intertwine. The nuclear researchers focus on the workings of the atomic nucleus. The high-energy and particle investigators examine ever smaller fragments of matter.
Fermilab is considered a high-energy or particle physics search center. Historically, increasing energies have been required to find particles with decreasing sizes. As the size of the particles found decreases, the forces which bind them together increase in binding energy; this requires higher and higher particle beam energies to break the particles from their nuclear confinement.
In contrast, CEBAF is to be designed as a nuclear physics research facility. Physicists there will use electrons as probes of the nucleus in an attempt to understand how the components of the nucleus
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