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Welcome to the Virtual Visitor Center at SLAC

Virtual Visitor Center at SLAC

Experimental Facilities at SLAC

When the particles are diverted into an experimental facility and allowed to impact on a target, the experiment is a one beam experiment.

Much of the exciting research being done today comes from colliding two beams, one of electrons and one of positrons and analyzing the particles that are produced. The idea is to have a bunch of electrons meet a bunch of positrons, traveling in the opposite direction, at the center of a detector. Every so often one electron will collide essentially head-on with one positron, both will disappear, and all their energy will be available to make something new!

Examples of one beam and colliding beam experiments and accelerator research facilities at SLAC are listed below.

One Beam

Colliding Beam

  • SPEAR and PEP Storage Rings
    • Past experiments studied electron-positron collisions at energies of 3GeV and 20 GeV.
  • B Factory
    • A 2-ring collider constructed in the PEP tunnel (now called PEP-II) and using the BaBar detector.
  • Stanford Linear Collider (SLC)
  • International Linear Collider
    • The ILC is an international effort, still in the planning stages, where two separate electron linear accelerators will operate head to head to achieve collision of the particles from one accelerator with those from the other.
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