Science Focus
original post »What do you do with the longest building in the world once it's fulfilled the purpose you've built it for? In the case of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, you find other ways of getting useful work out of it and the hardware it contains.
The main accelerator at SLAC was built to characterize the W and Z bosons, discovered earlier at CERN. By colliding electrons and their antiparticles (positrons) at a carefully chosen energy, SLAC produced these bosons in large numbers, allowing their detailed characterization. (The same approach is being planned for studying the Higgs Boson.)
SLAC has since been reinventing the giant accelerator. And the center itself has also diversified away from its roots as an accelerator facility, as we got to see in a recent visit.
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» see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/vsfzHcReB4c/
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