Atoms Under the Mountain

Stanford University's linear accelerator, for which President Eisenhower is asking Congress to appropriate $100 million (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), will be the most spectacular addition yet to the growing array of instruments science has devised to probe the atom.

It is the most powerful atom smasher now scheduled, and certainly the biggest. To build it, engineers will drive a tunnel two miles through the solid rock of a minor mountain near Palo Alto. This rocky housing will keep its radiation from frying innocent bystanders. At the accelerator's business end will be a complex knot of laboratory buildings stuffed with futuristic apparatus.

The most familiar particle accelerators are cyclotrons, synchrotrons, etc., which whirl ionized particles many times around a circular path, giving them more and more speed. But at the higher energies, the whirling particles are hard to control and give low beam intensity. Linear accelerators are relatively simple in principle, but tremendously complicated to engineer, and require much more space. Starting electrons at one end of a long, straight path, they push them toward the other end by a carefully timed series of microwave pulses, producing very high energies with the electrons concentrated in a high-intensity beam.

Stanford already has a linear accelerator 220 ft. long that turns out electrons with 700 million electron volts. The projected two-mile installation is expected to generate electrons with 15 billion volts at the start. Later, the scientists hope, it can be souped up to 40 billion volts. If Congress votes the money which the President wants, the accelerator should go into operation in about six years.

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