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Article: Experimenting with 40 trillion electron-volts: it takes hundred of physicists several years to design experimental detectors for the Superconducting Super Collider. (includes related article on gravity and the SSC)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- November 14, 1987
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1987 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Experimenting With 40 Trillion Electron-Volts
With much of the emphasis recently on the competition among 25 states to be the site of the proposed Superconducting Super Collider (SN: 9/12/87, p. 167), the ambitious physics of the project tends to get lost. But to anyone involved in particle physics, the SSC involves a fantastic amount of energy, and physicists' eyes tend to gleam as they talk about what they will do with it--or rather, what nature will do with it while they watch. Each head-on collision of two protons in the SSC would provide 40 trillion electron-volts (40 GeV) of energy. That's 40,000 times the mass of a proton.
For several years now, ...