New Pride of the Prairie

In almost every respect, it staggers the imagination. Built at a cost of $250 million by the Atomic Energy Commission, it sprawls over 6,800 acres of prairie land near Batavia, Ill., 30 miles west of Chicago. Its principal feature is a circular tunnel four miles in circumference. For every minute of operation, it requires around 1,400 gal. of cooling water. Using it for a single experiment will demand the services of dozens of scientists and technicians, countless hours of preparation and expenditures of many thousands of dollars.

The strange new pride of the prairie is the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher. After 21 years of painstaking construction, it is scheduled to begin its first trials in the next few weeks. Batavia's planners are convinced that by fall, actual experiments in the giant particle accelerator will lead to important new insights into the basic structure of the atom and, indeed, the fundamental mysteries of the universe.

Heavy Artillery. Basically, all accelerators have the same objective: to accelerate subatomic particles to such high energies that when they strike a target they will break it apart. The impact scatters the myriad tiny components of the target's atoms in all directions, thus enabling scientists to detect and analyze them. Science's heavy artillery comes in two different forms. One is the linear accelerator, which shoots the particles down a long, straight tube. The largest of these is the two-mile-long machine at Stanford University, which recently had its power increased to 22 billion electron volts.* The other, more common form is the circular accelerator, which whips particles round a ring-shaped tunnel to get them up to speed. With the monster at Batavia not yet in operation, the world's most powerful atom smasher is the Soviets' 76 billion-electron-volt accelerator near Moscow. As in some other circular accelerators, Batavia's "bullets" are protons. The arsenal that provides them is a device called a Cockcroft-Walton accelerator (named after two British physicists), which produces protons by boiling electrons off hydrogen atoms. After these protons are given an initial boost by the machine's high-voltage field, they are pushed by powerful pulses of high-frequency radio waves through a relatively short (500 ft.) linear accelerator. In the process, their energy is boosted to 200 million electron volts. Next, the protons are speeded through a 500-ft.-diameter doughnut-shaped device called a synchrotron booster, in which synchronized surges of power increase the energy of the protons to 8 billion electron volts. Then, in the vacuum tube of the big ring, the protons are accelerated by similarly synchronized pulses of such high energy that when they smash into the target areas, they will be traveling at 99.999% of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Shrewd Economies. Although the Batavia accelerator was originally planned to operate at 200 billion electron volts, its design was improved before the start of construction. When formal experimentation begins, it is expected to reach as high as 500 billion electron volts. At the same time, through the shrewd economies employed by Batavia's director. Physicist Robert R. Wilson, the estimated cost of the machine itself has actually been cut by about $100 million. Furthermore, with an additional investment of only $10 million to $20 million for more efficient superconducting magnets, the ultimate energy of the accelerator might well be increased to a fantastic one trillion electron volts.

To what use could such enormous power be put? Among other things, physicists will be able to pry even deeper into the atom's interior, helping them explore the still puzzling forces that hold its various components together. Even more tantalizing, experiments at Batavia could lead to proof of the existence of those baffling theoretical particles called quarks, which some scientists believe may be the basic building blocks of matter. Finally, the accelerator may provide clues to the awesomely violent and little-understood processes under way inside distant quasars, galaxies and even the sun. Says Physicist Edwin L. Goldwasser, second in command of the new accelerator: "Nature in the past has always surprised us. Undoubtedly, in what we learn here, she will again."

* An electron volt is the energy imparted to a single electron by one volt of electricity.

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