Aurora is also a part of the Central Coast Astronomical Society, and she arranged for the club to have a special tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator on January 26, 2017. Here’s a report from a club member about the trip:
The Central Coast Astronomy Society visit to SLAC was a very intresting trip. SLAC is located on the Stanford Ranch just to the West of the Standford campus in Palo Alto. SLAC was originally designed for particle physics work in the early 1960’s. It was the longest linear accelerator in the world.
Over the years the SLAC facility has evolved, expanding to include storage rings where sub-atomic particles could be banged against each other. By the late 1990’s, even with numerous updates and expansion of the facility, it was becoming dated. The Department of Energy considered dismantling SLAC but then a physicist came up with a way to use the electron beam from the linear accelerator to generate a very high power coherent X-ray source (an X-ray laser) that could be used for a great many physics experiments. Since the development of this coherent X-ray source SLAC has created more physics tools using the old linear accelerator and when we visited they had a part of the the old accelerator closed down while they built a new tool.
Our tour included a video on SLAC and a visit to the accelerator, where we had a lecture on the components of the original linear accelerator and then went out above the beam line to see some of the old (but updated) microwave sources and related equipment. After leaving the old accelerator we went to one of the old target buildings. At that building we saw a new wide area telescope being built at SLAC that will go into an observatory in a desert in Chile.
Our guide was a graduate physicists student working on a device that would detect dark matter deep in an old gold mine in South Dakota. The photos give images from our tour.
Tom Coughlin
Member
