Bevatron

The Bevatron was a particle accelerator — specifically, a weak-focusing proton synchrotron — at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U.S., which began operating in 1954. The antiproton was discovered there in 1955, resulting in the 1959 Nobel Prize in physics for Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain. It accelerated protons into a fixed target, and was named for its ability to impart energies of billions of eV. (Billions of eV Synchrotron.) At the time the Bevatron was designed, it was strongly suspected, but not known, that each particle had a corresponding anti-particle of opposite charge, identical in all other respects, a property known as charge symmetry. The anti-electron, or positron, had been first observed in the early 1930s and theoretically understood as a consequence of the Dirac equation at about the same time. Following World War II, positive and negative muons and pions were observed in cosmic-ray interactions seen in cloud chambers and stacks of nuclear photographic emulsions. The Bevatron was built to be energetic enough to create antiprotons, and thus test the hypothesis that every particle has a corresponding anti-particle. In 1955, the antiproton was discovered using the Bevatron. The antineutron was discovered soon thereafter by the team of Bruce Cork, Glen Lambertson, Oreste Piccioni, and William Wenzel in 1956, also at the Bevatron. Confirmation of the charge symmetry conjecture in 1955 led to the Nobel Prize for physics being awarded to Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain in 1959. Shortly after the Bevatron came into use, it was recognized that parity was not conserved in the weak interactions, which led to resolution of the tau-theta puzzle, the understanding of strangeness, and the establishment of CPT symmetry as a basic feature of relativistic quantum field theories. In order to create antiprotons (mass ~938 MeV/c2) in collisions with nucleons in a stationary target while conserving both energy and momentum, a proton beam energy of approximately 6.2 GeV is required.