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2 years ago Second Scene
The viewer enters a door to a physicist's office at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). You hear the chattering of his colleagues and telephone calls/a telephone ringing. The camera focuses on a physicists desk. There's a physicist bend over two documents titled "SPEAR Accelerator" and "MARK I Detectors"
Physicist: Welcome to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre! Here, we study particle physics by conducting different experiments. Let me explain to you how we are looking for new particles at this place.
The viewer can select a document (section) that starts an explanation of the basic components of the particle physics experiment at SLAC.
Section 1: SPEAR Particle Accelerator
Physicist: Our experiment takes place at the SPEAR accelerator at SLAC. As the name suggests SLAC is a research facility, that provides a linear particle accelerator (LINAC). That means particles that are given into the LINAC are accelerated along a linear track. In this way, they get faster and faster until a maximum velocity is reached. The LINAC is a practical tool to accelerate particles, but it quickly reaches its technological limits in possible acceleration, because of the limited distance the particles can travel before leaving the accelerator.
If you want to reach even higher velocities you have to work with a particle storage ring, also called a particle collider. Here, the particles are entered into a ring and they can pass through the accelerator track several times while gaining velocity and energy with every turn. This is the kind of accelerator that SPEAR represents at SLAC. It stands for Stanford Positron Electron Asymmetric Ring. Judging by the name you can already guess that it was used to accelerate and eventually collide electrons and positrons. However, the asymmetry part is just a historic reference and we can neglect it for now.
So to recap, at SLAC, we have a particle collider in which electrons are being accelerated in one direction of the ring and the positrons are accelerated in the other direction in form of particle beams. Whilst being accelerated electrons and positions are separated from each other until they reach a certain velocity and energy. At this energy, the two particle beams are brought together at the so-called interactions points. But what exactly happens when you collide electrons and positrons? Well, if you collide a particle with its antiparticle they annihilate. That means, both particles disappear and mass and velocity are translated into energy. This released energy is the starting point for the production of new particles.
And this is the whole point of having particle accelerators. We shoot particles onto each other in the hope to create different and maybe even new, and yet undiscovered particles. But to examine what kind of particles are created we have to look closely at the interaction point. SPEAR offers two such points along its circumference. Each of these points is used for a different experiment and offers different particle detectors to observe what happens after the beam collision.
tristen-shields
This is an issue to receive some feedback for parts of the second scene/chapter. Please leave your feedback. The goal of these sections is to explain the principle of particle accelerators and detectors as easy and clearly as possible.