I am doing a project for chemistry dealing with the NLC (next linear collider) being built outside of Stanford IL, and I need some interesting info on particle accelerators and antimatter. Wondering if Choobus or Ten might know a bit about these topics, or perhaps if there are any good links to it. Thanks!

Ask Positronium Boy. The closest I got to an accelerator was shaking hands with one of the SSSC scientists. Who now owns a cozy little breakfast restaurant.

what do you want to know?

This is a pretty good NLC link. NLC is pretty much the same shit as other linear colliders, but they have developed a nice solid state power modulator so it will probably be cheaper to build a TeV machine. However, I think the real future in cost effective accelerators is in laser induced plasma acceleration. It's still in the prototype stage but in principle a very intense laser pulse can produce a relativistic plasma that can be used to accelerate charged particles. You can get terrawatt accelerators tyhe size of a small car. The tricky bit is to stack them up and make then work toghether. It's definately the way to go though. The present accelerators are just too expensive to keep going, and a lot of the technology is from the 50's (hydrogen based klystrons! Seriously). This laser technique is potentially capable of upping the energy range to something useful, where quantum gravity theories can be tested, but it's still decades away (at least). I hope it won't be like thew old "joke" about fusion power which is "30 years in the future, and always will be". (Although I am super cool, obviously, I have to admit that many scientists are not, and this passes as humour in the plasma physics community).

The only big physics "thingy" I know anything about is the MINOS Project that's taking place not too far from me. I think they run tours in the summer, I should go check it out when I have a free weekend. :D

Wow...nothing about anal....I'm impressed. I didn't know you were actually this educated and could be this articulate without being vulgar. Not that your language offends me, I'm just not used to this...

It's like talking to God. Know what to ask; you'll only receive a good reaming otherwise.

I'm sure all Christians who post here would agree that talking to Choobus is just like talking to god!

Bet he didn't have a lot of kind words for fire ants, did he, eh?:lol:

And, notice Bighead, that ANY atheist calls in the "Largus Gunnus Anallus" on stupid posts that need it. This goes for hapless atheists, too, by the way. :/ The Choobus knows his shit, and if his bogosity detector goes off, you better duck.

bogosity detector! Excellent

Sorry, I guess I wasn't very specific. I was asking really quickly during class, so I didn't have too much time. Anyway, the whole thing started because we have a student teacher who used to work at Fermilab near Chicago. He made a powerpoint on the whole thing and showed it to us, and it seemed pretty damn cool. I had heard of antimatter before, but I thought it was just a suggestion or hypothesis in work. I didn't know that we had been making it all this time, but apparently we have. I am doing a quick powerpoint showing for class next... whenever spring break is over. I am doing it on the professions of a Chemist or Chemical engineer, and on the task of making the NLC run smoothly with such a diverse cultural population under expectation. Apparently, Fermilab has this sort of thing about other cultures (including religious beliefs... do they get it yet?), and we have been asked how we can make efficiency out of the multicultural background. And finally, some things about the NLC.

I have found professions of Chemistry, haven't found "multicultural" efficient methods, and haven't found out too much about the NLC. I, basically, was just wondering if anyone had any interesting tidbits to throw in about it.

Am i a geek, or it this is totally hot? or both?

I think that makes you a hot geek (and possibly a "nerd lover") :lol:

True, I do love the nerds. But only the really brilliant atheist ones!

OK, Scat, drop yer drawers and read: We were working with a large calutron, which employed ion cyclotron resonance heating using a "honk" kilowatt gyrotron at a frequency (breathing hard yet?) of "squeal" GHz, in the TE01 (eyes rolling back in your head, yet, sweetie?) mode, boiling the "coo-coo" off the source plate, and accelerating it across the module with an "oogah"-volt potential, selectively accelerating the reject ions with the "boing"-wave drive coil surrounded by the "beep" Tesla super-conducting magnet, into the collection slits. Man, that is as sexy as it gets! Sounds substituted for actual numbers, ala Mythbusters. Can't tell the commies everything, now, can we?

And, Choobus, I have not put oil in a klystron or gyratron in almost twenty years. But you still can't beat tubes for overall power.

True, but they are fucking expensive to maintain, and those bastard power supplies break all the time. I used to work on a 100 MeV linac at LLNL and the duty cycle betyween running and down for repair was about 1:5. A nice reliable solid state system is much more useful than a bastard beast that only works 20% of the time.