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PARTICLE PHYSICS

High-Energy Particle Physics

Following World War II tremendous amounts of federal funding became available for atom-smashing physics because of its association with weapons research. This largesse was extended to high-energy particle research thoughout the 1970s, despite the fact that this work had no discernible military applications and almost all high-energy physicists had refused to do secret research or work on weapons. Particle physicists were the doves of physics, preferring to search for the smallest (or "fundamental") particles of matter rather than develop weapons. Generous funding had allowed them to build the million-dollar equipment required to find such particles.

Fermilab

In 1972 the large accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, began operation. Named for the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, who laid the ground-work for both nuclear energy and weapons research before switching to research in particle physics, the place quickly acquired the nickname of Fermilab. The purpose of the accelerator is to push electrons extremely rapidly, breaking them into smaller parts, such as quarks. Physicists share time on accelerators, and during the period in which they use it, they try to design experiments that will tell them about the small particles produced.

Discovery

With Fermilab joining the accelerators at Stanford and the smaller one at the University of California at Berkeley, American physicists (including the many German-Jewish expatriate physicists who had fled the Nazis) began in the 1970s to have the resources to do a lot of research. New knowledge about fundamental particles was produced in the United States at a startling rate. In the 1970s high-energy particle physicists found the high-energy particle physicists found the tauon (1974), the J/psi particle, proving the existence of charm (1974), and the gluon (1979).