Over the 40 years that SLAC has been probing the fundamental laws of nature, many groundbreaking discoveries have been made and many of Nature’s secrets have been revealed.
1962—SLAC is founded and the largest physics project of its era is begun.
Construction begins on the two-mile linear accelerator and experimental area.
1966—Experiments begin. Electrons hurtling from the accelerator probe the structure of the proton and neutron. New, smaller particles within the proton, named “quarks”, are discovered. Nobel Prize in physics awarded in 1990 to physicists Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall, and Richard Taylor for this work.
The most crucial figure during this time was Dr. Wolfgang K.H. “Pief” Panofsky, who served as Director of SLAC from 1961 to 1984. In 1966, under Dr. Panofsky’s leadership the largest physics project of its time was designed, funded and completed
on-time and within budget.
1972—The Stanford Positron Electron Asymmetric Ring (SPEAR) is built and the era of particle colliders begins. Matter / antimatter experiments begin.
1973— X-ray imaging at SLAC begins in the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL). Intense X-ray beams from the electrons in SPEAR are used in the SSRL to perform detailed imaging experiments in a wide variety of scientific applications. This facility has been in use since 1973, and has blossomed from a small adjunct to the SPEAR particle physics program into a vital part of SLAC, attracting more than 1600 researchers every year.
1974—Physicists, led by Dr. Burton Richter, used a sophisticated detector at SPEAR to observe collisions between matter and antimatter. When these two types of particle collide, they vanish in a tiny explosion that can result in the creation of new types of particles. In this process, Dr. Richter’s team found a formerly unknown type of fundamental particle, the “charm quark, which they named “Psi”. An experiment at Brookhaven, led by Sam Ting, simultaneously discovered the same particle, which they dubbed “J.” This discovery had significant implications for our understanding of the evolution of the universe and of the behavior of fundamental particles. Dr. Richter and Dr. Ting shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics for this work.
1975—Using the SPEAR facility, Dr. Martin Perl discovered another new type of fundamental particle produced in the collisions. Occasionally the electron-positron collisions would result in a particle known as a Tau lepton. This type of particle had not been observed prior to Dr. Perl’s work, and though it does not exist in ordinary matter, the discovery had crucial implications. Dr. Perl was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics for this work.
1975— The Homebrew Computer Club, arguably the seminal catalyst of the personal computer revolution, grew too large for meeting in members' homes and garages and began holding their meetings in the SLAC auditorium in the Spring of 1975.
More significant than any individual, design, product, or company that it nurtured, Homebrew was a cultural and technological renaissance that catalyzed the transfer of computing from the insular priesthood of big corporations and government into the hands of individuals.
A Homebrew Computer Club reunion was held on March 5th, 2001 at SLAC and many of the "Homebrew 3/5/75 Originals" attended.
1980’s—New facilities are completed at SLAC. The Positron-Electron Project (PEP) was the logical extension of the SPEAR facility. Because the SPEAR ring was only 80 yards in diameter, the energies achievable, and thus the number of particles able to be produced in the collisions, were limited. PEP is a ring ten times the size of SPEAR, and together with an upgrade in the energy of the linear accelerator, was capable in 1980 of colliding electrons and positrons at energies several times as high as in SPEAR. This facility was used by many scientists throughout the decade to study in much greater detail the properties and behavior of the particles discovered in earlier experiments.
1983—Construction of the 2-mile long Stanford Linear Collider begins.
1989—The Stanford Linear Collider becomes operational and electrons and positrons can be made to collide at energies even higher than available in PEP. For almost a decade the SLAC Large Detector (SLD), the detector part of the Linear Collider, was crucial to the understanding of the forces that govern the existence of the fundamental building blocks studied in particle physics. By enabling physicists to perform extremely precise observations of these collisions, SLD made many fundamental contributions to our understanding of the laws of the universe.
1991—Dec 12. SLAC ignites the World Wide Web. The first website in North America is up and running at SLAC. This website is later referred to by Tim Berners-Lee as the “killer app” for the World Wide Web. By allowing members of the particle physics community easier access to a heavily used database of scientific literature, the SLAC website revealed the potential of the web to particle physicists, and from there it spread to the entire world. [Physicists had remote access to SPIRES-HEP before the web, and the remote SPIRES technology allowed SLAC to quickly adapt to the web, making access to SPIRES-HEP easier for everyone, and opening up SPIRES HEP information to the world.]
1994—Construction begins on the PEP-II upgrade of the PEP ring. This is part of the
B Factory program. Work began with upgrading the PEP collider to PEP-II, which enables more collisions that result in the production of B and B-bar particles.
1998— The first collisions occurred in the PEP-II rings and in 1999 the BABAR detector began recording the data coming from the collisions.
2001—The BABAR project announced the observation of CP violation, a phenomenon that may be responsible for the dominance of matter over antimatter in the Universe.
2006—Planned launch date for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, a satellite built by a large international team that included researchers from SLAC. GLAST will probe the mysteries of the cosmos using the same techniques SLAC uses for studying particle physics. This will further link fundamental particle physics with astrophysics and the Cosmos.
Last Update: Friday October 04, 2002 by Bellevin