History Of The Bevatron PDF Download

A sprawling group of buildings on an impressive campus site in the Berkeley hills provides the home of the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. A succession of large accelerators has been built there, the latest of which is the Bevatron. It is the largest and highest-energy accelerator in operation at the present time. It was built and is operated under contract with the United States Atomic Energy Commission. It is of the type known as a proton synchrotron, of which there are two others in operation, one at the University of Birmingham, England, whose energy is 1 Bev (billion electron volts), and another at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, known as the Cosmotron, which operates at 3 Bev. The Bevatron accelerates protons (stripped nuclei of hydrogen atoms) to an energy of 6.2 Bev. The design was started in 1947 under the direction of Professor E.O. Lawrence, and although it was the product of collaboration of a large group of physicists and engineers, the original conception was due to William Brobeck who also contributed more than any other individual. A working quarter-scale model was built and operated in 1948 and 1949 to verify the correctness of the design concept. Construction of the full-scale machine was completed in five years, and operation began in the spring of 1954. A period of adjustment and tuning up followed, and since September 1954 it has been the center of a most active and profitable program in high-energy physics. One new particle has been discovered, and an abundance of previously rare and poorly understood particles (heavy mesons and hyperons) has been provided for study. The program has had participants from laboratories all over the United States and from a half dozen other countries, in addition to the staff at the University of California. This article first describes the Bevatron and its operation, and then discusses a portion of the research program. The principles of the machine and its early history were given in ''The Bevatron'', by Lloyd Smith, Scientific American, February 1951.