25Bev

A massive steel and copper ring 700 ft. in diameter will make Long Island the world's atom-smashing capital. This week the Atomic Energy Commission announced that it will finance an "alternating gradient synchrotron" to shoot out beams of protons with energies up to 25 "bev" (25 billion electron-volts). It will be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, L.I. Probable cost: 20 megabucks ($20 million). Completion time: five to six years.

The ring, big enough to encircle seven baseball diamonds laid end to end, will be a sight like nothing else on earth, but what it will do for scientists may be even more spectacular. The accelerators already in operation (most powerful is Brookhaven's 2.3 bev cosmotron) have revealed that the nuclei of atoms are anything but simple.

When hit by a fast-moving proton, they shatter into many fragments. The list of these sub-atomic objects (mesons, V-par-ticles, etc.) is growing rapidly, and with it grows the baffled curiosity of the physicists.

There is good reason to believe that proton projectiles of much greater energy will be needed before the mystery of the nucleus can be cleared up. At present only the primary cosmic rays (which have to be sought by rockets or balloons) can supply such energies, but the new accelerator will shoot beams of "primaries" right into the scientists' instruments.

The 2.3 bev cosmotron, a "doughnut" 70 ft. in diameter and 8 ft. in cross section, needs 2,000 tons of steel for the magnets that keep its protons on circular orbits. To build a 25 bev machine on this same pattern would have required a fantastic amount of steel. Chief difficulty: the particles cannot be kept on accurate orbits, and so they must be provided with a wide (32 in. cross section) vacuum chamber. It takes massive steel magnets to fill this space with the necessary magnetic field.

In December 1952, Drs. Ernest Courant and Hartland Snyder of Brookhaven, Dr. M. Stanley of M.I.T. and Dr. John Blewett published a new method of focusing the protons in a chamber only 6 in. in cross section. They had been anticipated by Nicholas C. Christofilos, a U.S. citizen of Greek extraction who had been stranded in Greece during World War II and had taught himself physics from books distributed by the Germans. In 1953 he revealed that he had applied in 1950 for a U.S. patent on a "strong focusing" system much like the one developed at Brookhaven. His patent rights have been recognized, and Christofilos is working happily at Brookhaven.

The Brookhaven-Christofilos system will allow the ring of magnets to be much slimmer, only 3 ft. in cross section. The ring can be made larger in diameter without using too much material. Though it will produce protons with ten times as much energy as those from the cosmotron, it will need only 500 tons more steel.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.