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Particle Accelerator will bring antiproton beam online
:: 15 November, 2007
A €1.2-billion (US$1.7-billion) particle accelerator to be built in Germany has been given the final go-ahead. The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) will investigate exotic atomic nuclei and examine the states of matter in the moments after the Big Bang.
The 15-nation consortium behind the project gave it the green light on 7 November. Construction is scheduled to begin in late 2008 and should be complete by 2016.
FAIR will feature a double-ring synchrotron with a circumference of 1,100 metres connected to the existing GSI facility in Darmstadt, Germany. It will be able to accelerate ions as heavy as uranium, and will also generate the world's most powerful antiproton beam.
Germany is picking up three-quarters of the price tag, the rest will be paid for by the partner countries, which include China, France, India, Italy, Russia and Britain.
In figure,
The GSI's UNILAC will serve as a pre-accelerator for a planned double-ring synchrotron.
Note for particle accelerator
A particle accelerator is a device that uses electric fields to propel electrically-charged particles to high speeds and to contain them. An ordinary CRT television set is a simple form of accelerator. There are two basic types: linear (i.e. straight-line) accelerators and circular (i.e. circles) accelerators.
Beams of high-energy particles are useful for both fundamental and applied research in the sciences. For the most basic inquiries into the dynamics and structure of matter, space, and time, physicists seek the simplest kinds of interactions at the highest possible energies. These typically entail particle energies of many GeV or more, and the interactions of the simplest kinds of particles: leptons (e.g., electrons and positrons) and quarks for the matter, or photons and gluons for the field quanta. Since isolated quarks are experimentally unavailable due to color confinement, the simplest available experiments involve the interactions of, first, leptons with each other, and second, of leptons with nucleons, which are composed of quarks and gluons. To study the collisions of quarks with each other, we resort to collisions of nucleons, which at high energy may be usefully considered as essentially 2-body interactions of the quarks and gluons of which they are composed. Thus elementary particle physicists tend to use machines creating beams of electrons, positrons, protons, and anti-protons, interacting with each other or with the simplest nuclei (eg, hydrogen or deuterium) at the highest possible energies, generally hundreds of GeV or more.
Note for Big Bang
The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the universe whose primary assertion is that the universe has expanded into its current state from a primordial condition of enormous density and temperature. The term is also used in a narrower sense to describe the fundamental "fireball" that erupted at or close to an initial time-point in the history of our observed spacetime.
Theoretical support for the Big Bang comes from mathematical models, called Friedmann models. These models show that a Big Bang is consistent with general relativity and with the cosmological principle, which states that the properties of the universe should be independent of position or orientation.
Tags: particle accelerator , Germany , Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) , atomic nuclei , Big Bang , GSI , Darmstadt , antiproton beam , China , France , India , Italy , Russia , Britain. ,
