Astronuc said:
Now that's a picture that only a physicist (maybe a particle physicist) could love.
Which is why I know that there's a snowball chance in hell that I'd even get enough votes to make it in the final. :)
Since I'm on a roll with this thing anyway, I'll tell you why this is a unique accelerator, at least at Argonne.
While most accelerator facilities here are bigger, more complex, and better staffed than we are, there's one big important difference - most of them are either users facilities or in support of a facility for other users. The Advanced Photon Source (another "A" facility that I was contemplating in getting a photo of) has a very well-established accelerator - but it is being used to inject electrons into the APS synchrotron ring. The accelerator next door for the Intense Pulse Neutron Source is used to generate pulsed neutrons. The accelerator at ATLAS is used to generate heavy ions to various targets, etc.. In each one of them, the accelerator is used to support other functions and other users doing research on various things.
On the other hand, our accelerator IS the research project itself. It is not generating electrons to be used to do other things. Trying to design, test, and build a better accelerator is the whole point of our existence. We have no users to make use of the beam to do other things - we do have collaborators who, on occassions, want to make use of the electron beam that we can generate to do things like beam diagnostics and things. But other than that, the whole aim is to study the accelerator itself.
This really messes up the minds of people who have to do a safety overview of our facility. They keep having to keep in mind that, unlike the other accelerator facilities that they have reviewed where the conditions and setup are rather static, ours changes all the time since we keep building and adding components to the accelerator (the accelerator now is longer by a few feet than when Tom came over to take a look at it earlier this year). We always have to remind them that the accelerator IS the research project, not in support of other things. We don't have assigned accelerator operators like other accelerators, because the physicsts themselves ARE the accelerator operators. We build it, and then we run it.
Yowzah! This has gone longer than I wanted to.
Zz.
You know, don't try to get particle accelerators and airplanes to compete against nature photos.