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Article: Superconducting Super Collider
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER COLLIDER
SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER COLLIDER
(SSC), a federally financed project abandoned in 1993 that would have been capable of accelerating subatomic particles to energy levels forty times that previously achieved by researchers. For reasons of national prestige and international economic competitiveness, the Ronald Reagan administration in 1982 encouraged U.S. high-energy scientists to devise a challenging national accelerator project. Physicists responded with plans for the most ambitious particle accelerator ever attempted, a superconducting super collider. It was to be a proton collider far more energetic than existing ones, employing the superconducting ...