ADA (short for Anello Di Accumulazione, also stylized as AdA) was one of the first

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

particle accelerator A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel electric charge, charged particles to very high speeds and energies to contain them in well-defined particle beam, beams. Small accelerators are used for fundamental ...

s and the first-ever

electron The electron (, or in nuclear reactions) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary charge, elementary electric charge. It is a fundamental particle that comprises the ordinary matter that makes up the universe, along with up qua ...

–

positron The positron or antielectron is the particle with an electric charge of +1''elementary charge, e'', a Spin (physics), spin of 1/2 (the same as the electron), and the same Electron rest mass, mass as an electron. It is the antiparticle (antimatt ...

particle collider In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, fro ...

, measuring approximately in diameter and designed to store beams of 250 MeV.

History

The AdA collider was built at the LNF ( Frascati National Laboratory) in Frascati by a group of Italian physicists led by the Austrian physicist

Bruno Touschek Bruno Touschek (3 February 1921 – 25 May 1978) was an Austrian physicist, a survivor of the Holocaust, and initiator of research on electron-positron colliders. Biography Touschek was born and attended school in Vienna. In 1937, he was n ...

, the person to propose the idea of its development. During this time, many American physicists were interested in colliding two beams of particles head-on instead of beams on fixed targets''.'' ADA replaced one of the beams of particles (electrons) with a beam of antiparticles (positrons), a modification that was new and never before tested. After the machine's construction, it was operated from 1961 to 1964 by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, in

Frascati Frascati () is a city and in the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital in the Lazio region of central Italy. It is located south-east of Rome, on the Alban Hills close to the ancient city of Tusculum. Frascati is closely associated with science, ...

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

. In 1962, the machine was relocated to the Laboratoire de l’Accelerateur Lineaire in Orsay, France, where it was used for an additional four years alongside the laboratory's powerful particle injector. Towards the end of 1963, AdA's first electron-positron collisions were recorded and the machine was operated successfully a few more years before dismantling. AdA was never used to collect physics data, it was a testing ground for a type of machine that was to change the course of particle physics in the following decades. The ADA collider is no longer operational but the legacy of the machine lives on today. On 5 December 2013, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) Frascati National Laboratory (LNF) became an EPS Historic Site.

Impact

The ADA collider had a large impact on accelerator physics. It proved the possibility of accelerating and colliding a beam of particles and antiparticles in the same machine. The ADA collider was first in a long line of particle and antiparticle colliders and storage rings, including the Frascati National Laboratory's

ADONE ADONE (''big AdA'') was a high-energy (beam energy 1.5 GeV, center-of-mass energy 3 GeV) particle collider. It collided electrons with their antiparticles, positrons. It was 105 meters in circumference. It was operated from 1969 to 1993, by ...

(big AdA or Higher energy collider) and

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 Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

's Large Electron-Positron collider. ADA's success was also instrumental in discovering the Touschek effect in 1963 that explains how beam lifetime is affected by the scattering of particles inside a beam. It also allowed scientists to witness the interaction and annihilation of particles and antiparticles during energetic collisions, and allowing physicists to understand better several aspects of accelerator physics.

References

Particle accelerators {{accelerator-stub

History

Impact

See also

References