Fat Electrons

Harvard and M.I.T. announced this week that the Atomic Energy Commission is treating them jointly to a 6 billion-volt electron synchrotron, which will be built in Cambridge. Cost: $6,500,000. Its electrons will be steered around a circular vacuum chamber 236 ft. in diameter by 48 powerful magnets, each 11 ft. long, and they will be nudged to enormous speed by 16 radio-frequency circuits, each with the power of a full-scale television transmitter.

The Cambridge Electron Accelerator will not be as powerful as the proton synchrotron (25 billion to 30 billion electron volts) that is being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, but the electrons that emerge from it will be the fastest particles created by man. Since electrons are much lighter than protons (the mass of one proton equals 1,837 electrons), they must speed much faster than protons to pack the same punch.

The Cambridge electrons will move at almost but not quite the speed of light, which is the absolute speed limit of the universe. If one of them were to start around the earth at the same time as a beam of light, it would be racing only five inches behind when the beam had made the circuit and reached its starting point.

Einstein's law on the equivalence of mass and energy (E = mc2) says that a particle which increases its speed must gain mass. In obeying Einstein, the Cambridge electrons grow very fat indeed. When they come out of the accelerator, their mass is about 12,000 times as great as when they went in.

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