The Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) is a
particle accelerator
A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams.
Large accelerators are used for fundamental research in particle ...
located at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base and Japanese internment c ...
in
Long Island
Long Island is a densely populated island in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, part of the New York metropolitan area. With over 8 million people, Long Island is the most populous island in the United Sta ...
,
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
, United States.
The Alternating Gradient Synchrotron was built on the innovative concept of the alternating gradient, or
strong-focusing principle, developed by Brookhaven physicists. This new concept in accelerator design allowed scientists to accelerate
proton
A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol , H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 ''e'' elementary charge. Its mass is slightly less than that of a neutron and 1,836 times the mass of an electron (the proton–electron mass ...
s to energies that were previously unachievable. The AGS became the world's premiere accelerator when it reached its design energy of 33 billion electron volts (GeV) on July 29, 1960.
Until 1968, the AGS was the highest energy accelerator in the world, slightly higher than its 28 GeV sister machine, the
Proton Synchrotron
The Proton Synchrotron (PS, sometimes also referred to as CPS) is a particle accelerator at CERN. It is CERN's first synchrotron, beginning its operation in 1959. For a brief period the PS was the world's highest energy particle accelerator. It ...
at
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...
, the European laboratory for high-energy physics. While 21st century accelerators can reach energies in the trillion electron volt region, the AGS earned researchers three
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...
s and today serves as the injector for Brookhaven's
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC ) is the first and one of only two operating heavy-ion colliders, and the only spin-polarized proton collider ever built. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, and used by an ...
; it remains the world's highest intensity high-energy proton accelerator.
The AGS Booster, constructed in 1991, further augments the capabilities of the AGS, enabling it to accelerate more intense
proton beam
A charged particle beam is a spatially localized group of electrically charged particles that have approximately the same position, kinetic energy (resulting in the same velocity), and direction. The kinetic energies of the particles are much ...
s and heavy ions such as
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile met ...
. Brookhaven's
linear particle accelerator
A linear particle accelerator (often shortened to linac) is a type of particle accelerator that accelerates charged subatomic particles or ions to a high speed by subjecting them to a series of oscillating electric potentials along a linear b ...
(LINAC) provides 200 million electron volt (MeV) protons to the AGS Booster, and the Electron Beam Ion Source (EBIS) and
Tandem Van de Graaff accelerators provide other ions to the AGS Booster. The AGS Booster then accelerates these particles for injection into the AGS. The AGS Booster also provides particle beams to the
NASA Space Radiation Laboratory.
Importance of alternate-gradient focusing
Nobel Prizes
The work performed at the accelerator led to three
Nobel Prizes in Physics:
*1962:
Leon Lederman
Leon, Léon (French) or León (Spanish) may refer to:
Places
Europe
* León, Spain, capital city of the Province of León
* Province of León, Spain
* Kingdom of León, an independent state in the Iberian Peninsula from 910 to 1230 and again fro ...
,
Melvin Schwartz
Melvin Schwartz (; November 2, 1932 – August 28, 2006) was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of ...
and
Jack Steinberger
Jack Steinberger (born Hans Jakob Steinberger; May 25, 1921December 12, 2020) was a German-born American physicist noted for his work with neutrinos, the subatomic particles considered to be elementary constituents of matter. He was a recipient ...
discovered the
muon neutrino
The muon neutrino is an elementary particle which has the symbol () and zero electric charge. Together with the muon it forms the second generation of leptons, hence the name muon neutrino. It was discovered in 1962 by Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwar ...
.
*1976:
Samuel C. C. Ting
Samuel Chao Chung Ting (, born January 27, 1936) is a Chinese-American physicist who, with Burton Richter, received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for discovering the subatomic J/ψ particle. More recently he has been the principal investigator in res ...
discovered the ''J'' part of the
''J''/ψ and the
charm quark
The charm quark, charmed quark or c quark (from its symbol, c) is the third-most massive of all quarks, a type of elementary particle. Charm quarks are found in hadrons, which are subatomic particles made of quarks. Examples of hadrons containin ...
.
*1980:
James Cronin
James Watson Cronin (September 29, 1931 – August 25, 2016) was an American particle physicist.
Cronin was born in Chicago, Illinois, and attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He and co-researcher Val Logsdon Fitch were aw ...
and
Val Fitch discovered
CP violation
In particle physics, CP violation is a violation of CP-symmetry (or charge conjugation parity symmetry): the combination of C-symmetry (charge symmetry) and P-symmetry ( parity symmetry). CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the ...
by experimenting with
Kaon
KAON (Karlsruhe ontology) is an ontology infrastructure developed by the University of Karlsruhe and the Research Center for Information Technologies in Karlsruhe.
Its first incarnation was developed in 2002 and supported an enhanced version of ...
s.
See also
*
Strong focusing
In accelerator physics strong focusing or alternating-gradient focusing is the principle that, using sets of multiple electromagnets, it is possible to make a particle beam simultaneously converge in both directions perpendicular to the direction ...
(also known as alternating-gradient focusing — an idea pioneered on this accelerator)
References
*
External links
Brookhaven National Laboratory: Alternating Gradient Synchrotron web page*
Particle physics facilities
Brookhaven National Laboratory
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