The world's newest atom smasher has reached a milestone. It's achieved its "first turns," which are circulating beams of particles, for the very first time.
The new atom smasher is located in Japan and is known as the SuperKEKB accelerator. It fills a unique role in terms of atom smashers worldwide, since it's at the forefront of what is called the "intensity frontier." It's designed to deliver more than 40 times the rate of collisions between particles than its predecessor.
Last month, scientists at the accelerator circulated a beam of positrons moving close to the speed of light through a narrow tube around the 3-km circumference of its main ring 10 meters underground. This past week, the scientists there succeeded in circulating a beam of electrons moving near the speed of light in the opposite direction. This marks the device's "first turns," which is a milestone when beams of particles are circulated through many revolutions of an accelerator for the first time.
At SuperKEKB, rings of magnets accelerate electrons in one direction and their anti-matter equivalent, positrons, in the opposite directions. Each stream of particles is amazingly slim, about one-thousandth the width of a human hair.
Next year, SuperKEKB will accelerate the two beams simultaneously, compress them into a smaller area than any other accelerator on Earth, and then smash them together to produce B mesons and tau leptons, which are heavy particles whose decays can reveal a bit more about physics.
"Global cooperation is necessary to address the most compelling questions in particle physics," said James Siegrist, associate director of science for high energy physics in the DOE Office of Science. "Now nations must specialize in the facilities that they build and provide access to those facilities to physicists from around the world. We appreciate that Japan is hosting this world-class facility where U.S. physicists will study rare particle interactions and look for new physics while in return contributing new state-of-the-art components to the international Bell II collaboration's detector."
The new atom smasher could reveal a bit more about physics and could allow scientists to better understand the forces that shape our universe.
