Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Encyclopedia : S : ST : STA : Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
- This is an article about the particle physics research facility. For other uses of SLAC, see SLAC (disambiguation).
Contents
History
Founded in 1962, the facility is located on 426 acres of Stanford University-owned land on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California—just down the road from the University's main campus. The main accelerator, a 3.2 kilometer long RF linear accelerator which can accelerate electrons and positrons up to 50 GeV, has been operational since 1966. It is buried 10 metres (30 feet) below ground and passes underneath Interstate 280. As of 2005, SLAC employs over 1,000 people, some 150 of which are physicists with doctorate degrees, and serves over 3,000 visiting researchers yearly, operating particle accelerators for high-energy physics and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) for synchrotron light radiation research.
Research at SLAC has produced three Nobel Prizes in Physics:
- 1976 - The Charm Quark — see J/Ψ particle [Nobel Prize in Physics 1976]. Half prize awarded to Burton Richter.
- 1990 - Quark structure inside Protons and Neutrons [Nobel Prize in Physics 1990] Award split between Jerome I. Friedman, Henry W. Kendall, and Richard E. Taylor.
- 1995 - The tau lepton [Nobel Prize in Physics 1995] Half prize awarded to Martin L. Perl.
PEP-II and SSRL
Since 1998 SLAC has been providing electron-positron collisions to the 2.2km dual storage rings for the BaBar Experiment in order to study charge-parity symmetry. The laboratory is the site of a number of National User Facilities, including the B-Factory. PEP-II is used in conjuction with the BaBar detector located at interaction area (IR2), or twelve o'clock from the LINAC.
SSRL is a synchrotron light user facility located on the SLAC campus. Previously the ring in which the J/Psi particle was discovered, it is now used exclusivly for synchrotron light experiments.
Injectors
(PEP-II) uses the main LINAC injector while the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory or (SSRL) SPEAR3 has its own independent injector for research. In the mid to late 1980's funding became available to add the SPEAR injector to cutoff parasitic dependency from the main LINAC.Other Discoveries
- SLAC has also been instrumental in the development of the klystron, a high-power microwave amplification tube.
- There was a Paleoparadoxia found at the SLAC site, and its skeleton can be seen at a small museum there in the Breezeway.[Stanford's SLAC Paleoparadoxia] much thanks to Adele Panofsky, Dr. Panofsky's wife, for her reassembly of the bones of the Paleoparadoxia uncovered at SLAC.
See also
- Accelerator physics
- Beamline
- Cyclotron
- Dipole magnet
- Electromagnetism
- Particle beam
- Particle physics
- List of particles
- Quadrupole magnet
- Spallation Neutron Source
- Wolfgang Panofsky (1961-84, SLAC Director; Professor, Stanford University)
References
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
[Special]
- [Early images of SLAC during construction]
- [SLAC beamlines over time]
- [SLAC Virtual Visitors Center] - including science, history, photos and more about SLAC
- [Dr. Wolfgang K. H. "Pief" Panofsky] SLAC Director 1961-1984.
- [Einstein's Big Idea] (NOVA program includes SLAC footage.)
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.