So what is SLAC anyways????

Good question, my friend, and unfortunately for all of us, the answer is not short. In fact, it is going to take me the entire summer to tackle this beast of a question, but I'll start now.

A particle accelerator takes teeny-tiny bits of matter such as protons, electrons, and positrons and speeds them up to nearly the speed of light. Which particles it accelerates, how it accelerates them, how fast it gets them going, and what it does with them once they're up to speed is what makes accelerators different.

Stanford created the first electron accelerator 60 years ago and has been a leader in particle physics ever since. Soon after, SLAC built it's 2-mile-long linear accelerator, which is just what it sounds like, a machine that accelerates electrons and positrons in a straight line. In the past, these particles were smashed together in a small ring at the end of the line creating enormous amounts of energy. And because, as Einstein so correctly pointed out, E=MC^2, the energy created mass.

Some mass that is created is so unstable it almost immediately decays into other types of particles. Scientists track these particles, recreate the event, and look for new types of particles to gain a better understanding of life, the universe, and everything (plagiarized from Douglas Adams).

At least that's what SLAC used to do.

The bigger and more powerful the accelerator, the more types of particles it can create. There is an enormous accelerator being built at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland called the Large Hadron Collider that will collide particles at energies never before seen. The LHC is different in that it accelerates protons instead of electrons and positrons like SLAC, which allow for much greater energies in the collisions.

Research began at SLAC by shooting electron beams into hydrogen targets in an attempt to explore the inner workings of protons. The result was the discovery of quarks and a Nobel prize. Afterwards, collisions were reconstructed in a hunt for new particles, much like what the LHC will do. Since then, the collisions have been tuned to create a certain type of particle called the B-Meson, which is now being extensively researched. Because SLAC has become a mecca of research and cutting-edge technology, it is also exploring particle physics in many other different, but equally exciting, ways.

SLAC currently participates in many Department of Energy projects. Aside from investigating B-Mesons, the electron beam is also used in the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), which uses x-rays created from the accelerated electrons to map the molecular structure of different compounds. SLAC is also building a camera for the most comprehensive and ambitious telescope ever conceived. And it is building new beam lines to create even more powerful x-ray bursts that will be able to map chemical reactions as they are occurring.

I don't care who you are, that's pretty neat.

Believe it or not, these descriptions are simplistic, and only scratch the surface of what is being done at SLAC.

And this entry has gotten long enough.

So stick with me over the next couple of months and I'll try to cover more of what's happening at SLAC today and tomorrow. But if you just can't wait that long, check out their website by clicking here.