Accelerators: They Smash Atoms, Don't They?

Antiprotons complete the circuit around Fermilab in about 22 millionths of a second. Lederman completes the circuit in approximately 38 minutes. This means that he gets lapped about 100 million times before he finishes.

Fermilab's Tevatron produces collisions at about 2 TeV (trillion electron volts). This is 400,000 times the energy created by Rutherford's alpha particle collisions. The Super Collider is being designed to operate at about 40 TeV. This would release similar energy as in lighting a match, however, the energy would be much more concentrated (only a few particles rather than the multi billions in a match).

It theoretically requires 10 TeV to crack open a "God Particle" (size: 10^-20m).

Due to E = m c^2, as the particle accelerates, the particle becomes heavier (making it harder to accelerate).

The best pictures of the proton were taken in the 1950's by Robert Hofstadter. A beam of electrons was used rather than protons. His team aimed a well-organized beam of approximately 800 MeV electrons at liquid hydrogen.

When two protons collide a pion is made. A pion was first discovered by Cesare Lattes in emulsions exposed to cosmic rays in 1947. Pions are unstable, however, they decay within one hundredth oh a microsecond into a muon and a neutrino. Strangely enough, the neutrino doesn't leave a track in the emulsion.

Fringe field focusing was discovered in 1950 by Lederman and John. They noticed that particles didn't just fly everywhere when they were emerging from a target in the accelerator with plausible direction and energies. They curved around the machine in a tight beam due to the properties of the magnetic field near and beyond the rim of the cyclotron magnet.

An interesting fact in this section is that when certain metals are cooled to extremely low temperatures (around absolute zero on the Kelvin scale) they lose all their resistance to electricity.