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In this issue:
A Shotgun Approach to New Particles
symmetry: Science Meets Architecture
Document Control Submission Changes

SLAC Today

Thursday - July 6, 2006
(Image - Simulated ILC Event)
   Simulated event illustrating the associated production of a Higgs particle and a Z boson at a linear collider. (Click image for larger version. Image courtesy of Norman Graf.)

A Shotgun Approach to New Particles

by Krista Zala

At the International Linear Collider, electrons will shoot out from one end of the accelerator at nearly the speed of light and collide with a beam of anti-electrons, or positrons, traveling at the same speed. The expectation is that the energies of the collisions will be great enough to produce particles that could help further our understanding of the universe.

The ILC's latest design, counting the accelerator, service tunnels and elliptical damping rings, proposes a tunnel complex of nearly 85 km. The current largest accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, forms a 27 km ring.

Both the electrons and positrons will be accelerated to an energy of 250 GeV (giga or billion electron volts). This is a very large energy: an electron at rest has a mass about 1/2000 that of a proton; an accelerated electron at the ILC will have a relativistic mass of 250 protons. Read more...

symmetry: Science Meets Architecture

by Krista Zala

(Picture - Jantar Mantar)
SLAC's Gregory Loew captured this image while visiting Delhi, India. (Click image for larger version.)

A step away from the cars scuttling down the streets of Delhi, precisely arranged on a tame green lawn, is what looks like a giant's playground.

Twin cylinders squat at the far end. A pole stands at the center of each, matching the windowed cylinders' radii and heights. Their shadows fall across the floor's slender wedges, where minutes and degrees mark the lunar calendar.

Nearby, twin bowls carved in marble host a celestial map. A giant sundial, cradled in a quadrant, soars above it all.

This is Delhi's Jantar Mantar, one of four remaining observatories in towns across northern India, and a site visited by physicists who were in India for an International Linear Collider Global Design Effort meeting.

The buildings date to the 1720s, when Jai Singh II ruled Amber, India. Singh commissioned the brick and marble observatories to measure time, create astronomical tables, and predict the movements of celestial bodies–which also meant predicting eclipses.

The advent of small brass instruments made this massive masonry obsolete before the first brick was laid. Today, it offers a glimpse of India's early efforts to bridge science and architecture.

To read more in symmetry click here.

Document Control Submission Changes

by Rick Tankersley

Document control is the department responsible for releasing and archiving all submitted SLAC engineering documents and drawings. The most recent 50,000 of these are viewable online as PDFs. While older documents are still searchable using key words, their PDF images are only added by request. You can search the database using the Online Drawing Access tool (click here for the online tool).

Previously, the submission of all such documents to Document Control required a 30 character SPIRES title.

For several years, Document Control has been using an Oracle database system instead of SPIRES. After switching to Oracle, all documents and drawings submitted to Document Control have had their full document title as well as their SPIRES title written to the database. The SPIRES title is now redundant and as of July 7, 2006 it will no longer be required for submission.

For more information, please contact Rick Tankersley at x3635, rickt@slac.stanford.edu.

SLAC Today Archives

by Kelen Tuttle

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Initial results from the SLAC Today survey indicate that most readers don't know that SLAC Today archives all issues online.

To access the archives, simply click on the red "Search the Archives" link at the bottom of the right-most column in each issue of SLAC Today.

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