Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering; the Institute is a land-grant, sea-grant, space-grant university, with a campus that extends more than a mile alongside the Charles River. Its influence in the physical sciences and architecture, more in biology, linguistics and social science and art, has made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world. MIT is ranked among the world's top universities; as of March 2019, 93 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 73 Marshall Scholars, 45 Rhodes Scholars, 41 astronauts, 16 Chief Scientists of the US Air Force have been affiliated with MIT.
The school has a strong entrepreneurial culture, the aggregated annual revenues of companies founded by MIT alumni would rank as the tenth-largest economy in the world. MIT is a member of the Association of American Universities. In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a "Conservatory of Art and Science", but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by the governor of Massachusetts on April 10, 1861. Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances, he did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that: The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.
The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories. Two days after MIT was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865; the new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes" and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay. MIT was informally called "Boston Tech"; the institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker.
Programs in electrical, chemical and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand. The curriculum drifted with less focus on theoretical science; the fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these "Boston Tech" years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding; the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court put an end to the merger scheme. In 1916, the MIT administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT's move to a spacious new campus consisting of filled land on a mile-long tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River.
The neoclassical "New Technology" campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded by anonymous donations from a mysterious "Mr. Smith", starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million in cash and Kodak stock to MIT. In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios; the Compton reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering". Unlike Ivy League schools, MIT catered more to middle-class families, depended more on tuition than on endow
Pieter Zeeman
Pieter Zeeman was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Lorentz for his discovery of the Zeeman effect. Pieter Zeeman was born in Zonnemaire, a small town on the island of Schouwen-Duiveland, Netherlands, to Catharinus Forandinus Zeeman, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, Willemina Worst, he became interested in physics at an early age. In 1883, the aurora borealis happened to be visible in the Netherlands. Zeeman a student at the high school in Zierikzee, made a drawing and description of the phenomenon and submitted it to Nature, where it was published; the editor praised "the careful observations of Professor Zeeman from his observatory in Zonnemaire". After finishing high school in 1883, Zeeman went to Delft for supplementary education in classical languages a requirement for admission to University, he stayed at the home of Dr J. W. Lely, co-principal of the gymnasium and brother of Cornelis Lely, responsible for the concept and realization of the Zuiderzee Works.
While in Delft, he first met Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, to become his thesis adviser. After Zeeman passed the qualification exams in 1885, he studied physics at the University of Leiden under Kamerlingh Onnes and Hendrik Lorentz. In 1890 before finishing his thesis, he became Lorentz's assistant; this allowed him to participate in a research programme on the Kerr effect. In 1893 he submitted his doctoral thesis on the Kerr effect, the reflection of polarized light on a magnetized surface. After obtaining his doctorate he went for half a year to Friedrich Kohlrausch's institute in Strasbourg. In 1895, after returning from Strasbourg, Zeeman became Privatdozent in mathematics and physics in Leiden; the same year he married Johanna Elisabeth Lebret. In 1896, shortly before moving from Leiden to Amsterdam, he measured the splitting of spectral lines by a strong magnetic field, a discovery now known as the Zeeman effect, for which he won the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics; this research involved an investigation of the effect of magnetic fields on a light source.
He discovered that a spectral line is split into several components in the presence of a magnetic field. Lorentz first heard about Zeeman's observations on Saturday 31 October 1896 at the meeting of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, where these results were communicated by Kamerlingh Onnes; the next Monday, Lorentz called Zeeman into his office and presented him with an explanation of his observations, based on Lorentz's theory of electromagnetic radiation. The importance of Zeeman's discovery soon became apparent, it confirmed Lorentz's prediction about the polarization of light emitted in the presence of a magnetic field. Thanks to Zeeman's work it became clear that the oscillating particles that according to Lorentz were the source of light emission were negatively charged, were a thousandfold lighter than the hydrogen atom; this conclusion was reached well before Thomson's discovery of the electron. The Zeeman effect thus became an important tool for elucidating the structure of the atom.
Shortly after his discovery, Zeeman was offered a position as lecturer in Amsterdam, where he started to work in Autumn of 1896. In 1900 this was followed by his promotion to professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam. In 1902, together with his former mentor Lorentz, he received the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of the Zeeman effect. Five years in 1908, he succeeded Van der Waals as full professor and Director of the Physics Institute in Amsterdam. In 1918 he published "Some experiments on gravitation: The ratio of mass to weight for crystals and radioactive substances" in the Proceedings of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, experimentally confirming the equivalence principle with regard to gravitational and inertial mass. A new laboratory built in Amsterdam in 1923 was renamed the Zeeman Laboratory in 1940; this new facility allowed Zeeman to pursue refined investigation of the Zeeman effect. For the remainder of his career he remained interested in research in Magneto-Optics.
He investigated the propagation of light in moving media. This subject became the focus of a renewed interest because of special relativity, enjoyed keen interest from Lorentz and Einstein. In his career he became interested in mass spectrometry. In 1898 Zeeman was elected to membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, he served as its secretary from 1912 to 1920, he won the Henry Draper Medal in 1921, several other awards and Honorary degrees. Zeeman was elected a Foreign member of the Royal Society in 1921, he retired as a professor in 1935. Zeeman died on 9 October 1943 in Amsterdam, was buried in Haarlem. Zeeman received the following awards for his contributions. Nobel Prize for Physics Matteucci Medal Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1921 Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences Rumford Medal Franklin Medal The crater Zeeman on the Moon is named in his honour. Atom and Atomic Theory Bohr-Sommerfeld model Fresnel drag coefficient Light-dragging effects Media related to Pieter Zeeman at Wikimedia Commons Bertrand, Gabriel, "Allocution", Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, Paris, 217: 625–640, available at Gallica.
The "Address" of Gabriel Bertrand of December 20, 1943 at the French Academy: he gives biographical sketches of the lives of deceased members, including Pieter Zeeman, David Hilbert and Georges Giraud. Albert van Helden Pieter Zeeman 1865 – 1943 In: K. van Berkel, A. van Helden and L. Palm ed. A History of Science in
Pierre Curie
Pierre Curie was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism and radioactivity. In 1903, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Henri Becquerel, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". Born in Paris on 15 May 1859, Pierre Curie was the son of Eugene Curie, a doctor of French Huguenot Protestant origin from Alsatia, Sophie-Claire Depouilly Curie, he was educated by his father and in his early teens showed a strong aptitude for mathematics and geometry. When he was 16, he earned his math degree. By the age of 18, he had completed the equivalent of a higher degree, but did not proceed to a doctorate due to lack of money. Instead he worked as a laboratory instructor; when Pierre Curie was preparing for his bachelor of science degree, he worked in the laboratory of Jean-Gustave Bourbouze in the Faculty of Science. In 1880 Pierre and his older brother Jacques demonstrated that an electric potential was generated when crystals were compressed, i.e. piezoelectricity.
To aid this work they invented the piezoelectric quartz electrometer. The following year they demonstrated the reverse effect: that crystals could be made to deform when subject to an electric field. All digital electronic circuits now rely on this in the form of crystal oscillators. In subsequent work on magnetism Pierre Curie defined the Curie scale; this work involved delicate equipment - balances, etc. Pierre Curie was introduced to Maria Skłodowska by physicist Józef Wierusz-Kowalski. Curie took her into his laboratory as his student, his admiration for her grew. He began to regard Skłodowska as his muse, she refused his initial proposal, but agreed to marry him on 26 July 1895. It would be a beautiful thing, a thing I dare not hope, if we could spend our life near each other, hypnotized by our dreams: your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, our scientific dream; the Curies had a happy, affectionate marriage, they were known for their devotion to each other. Prior to his famous doctoral studies on magnetism, he designed and perfected an sensitive torsion balance for measuring magnetic coefficients.
Variations on this equipment were used by future workers in that area. Pierre Curie studied ferromagnetism and diamagnetism for his doctoral thesis, discovered the effect of temperature on paramagnetism, now known as Curie's law; the material constant in Curie's law is known as the Curie constant. He discovered that ferromagnetic substances exhibited a critical temperature transition, above which the substances lost their ferromagnetic behavior; this is now known as the Curie temperature. The Curie temperature is used to study plate tectonics, treat hypothermia, measure caffeine, to understand extraterrestrial magnetic fields. Pierre Curie formulated what is now known as the Curie Dissymmetry Principle: a physical effect cannot have a dissymmetry absent from its efficient cause. For example, a random mixture of sand in zero gravity has no dissymmetry. Introduce a gravitational field, there is a dissymmetry because of the direction of the field; the sand grains can'self-sort' with the density increasing with depth.
But this new arrangement, with the directional arrangement of sand grains reflects the dissymmetry of the gravitational field that causes the separation. Curie worked with his wife in isolating radium, they were the first to use the term "radioactivity", were pioneers in its study. Their work, including Marie Curie's celebrated doctoral work, made use of a sensitive piezoelectric electrometer constructed by Pierre and his brother Jacques Curie. Pierre Curie's 1898 publication with his wife Mme. Curie and with M. G. Bémont for their discovery of radium and polonium was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society presented to the ESPCI ParisTech in 2015. Curie and one of his students, Albert Laborde, made the first discovery of nuclear energy, by identifying the continuous emission of heat from radium particles. Curie investigated the radiation emissions of radioactive substances, through the use of magnetic fields was able to show that some of the emissions were positively charged, some were negative and some were neutral.
These correspond to alpha and gamma radiation. The curie is a unit of radioactivity named in honor of Curie by the Radiology Congress in 1910, after his death. Subsequently, there has been some controversy over whether the naming was in honor of Pierre, Marie, or both. In the late nineteenth century, Pierre Curie was investigating the mysteries of ordinary magnetism when he became aware of the spiritualist experiments of other European scientists, such as Charles Richet and Camille Flammarion. Pierre Curie thought systematic investigation into the paranormal could help with some unanswered questions about magnetism, he wrote to his fiancée Marie: "I must admit that those spiritual phenomena intensely interest me. I think in them are questions that deal with physics." Pierre Curie's notebooks from this period show. He did not attend séances such as those of Eusapia Palladino in Paris in 1905–6 as a mere
John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh
John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, was a British scientist who made extensive contributions to both theoretical and experimental physics. He spent all of his academic career at the University of Cambridge. Among many honours, he received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his investigations of the densities of the most important gases and for his discovery of argon in connection with these studies." He served as President of the Royal Society from 1905 to 1908 and as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1908 to 1919. Rayleigh provided the first theoretical treatment of the elastic scattering of light by particles much smaller than the light's wavelength, a phenomenon now known as "Rayleigh scattering", which notably explains why the sky is blue, he studied and described transverse surface waves in solids, now known as "Rayleigh waves". He contributed extensively to fluid dynamics, with concepts such as the Rayleigh number, Rayleigh flow, the Rayleigh–Taylor instability, Rayleigh's criterion for the stability of Taylor–Couette flow.
He formulated the circulation theory of aerodynamic lift. In optics, Rayleigh proposed a well known criterion for angular resolution, his derivation of the Rayleigh–Jeans law for classical black-body radiation played an important role in birth of quantum mechanics. Rayleigh's textbook The Theory of Sound is still used today by engineers. Strutt was born on 12 November 1842 at Langford Grove in Essex. In his early years he suffered from poor health, he attended Eton College and Harrow School, before going on to the University of Cambridge in 1861 where he studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1865, a Master of Arts in 1868, he was subsequently elected to a Fellowship of Trinity. He held the post until his marriage to Evelyn Balfour, daughter of James Maitland Balfour, in 1871, he had three sons with her. In 1873, on the death of his father, John Strutt, 2nd Baron Rayleigh, he inherited the Barony of Rayleigh, he was the second Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge, from 1879 to 1884.
He first described dynamic soaring in the British journal Nature. From 1887 to 1905 he was Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. Around the year 1900 Rayleigh developed the duplex theory of human sound localisation using two binaural cues, interaural phase difference and interaural level difference; the theory posits that we use two primary cues for sound lateralisation, using the difference in the phases of sinusoidal components of the sound and the difference in amplitude between the two ears. In 1919, Rayleigh served as President of the Society for Psychical Research; as an advocate that simplicity and theory be part of the scientific method, Rayleigh argued for the principle of similitude. Rayleigh was elected Fellow of the Royal Society on 12 June 1873, served as president of the Royal Society from 1905 to 1908. From time to time Rayleigh participated in the House of Lords, he died on 30 June 1919, in Essex. He was succeeded, as the 4th Lord Rayleigh, by his son Robert John Strutt, another well-known physicist.
Lord Rayleigh was buried in the graveyard of All Saints' Church in Terling in Essex. The rayl unit of acoustic impedance is named after him. Rayleigh was an Anglican. Though he did not write about the relationship of science and religion, he retained a personal interest in spiritual matters; when his scientific papers were to be published in a collection by the Cambridge University Press, Strutt wanted to include a religious quotation from the Bible, but he was discouraged from doing so, as he reported: When I was bringing out my Scientific Papers I proposed a motto from the Psalms, "The Works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein." The Secretary to the Press suggested with many apologies that the reader might suppose that I was the Lord. Still, he had his wish and the quotation was printed in the five-volume collection of scientific papers. In a letter to a family member, he wrote about his rejection of materialism and spoke of Jesus Christ as a moral teacher: I have never thought the materialist view possible, I look to a power beyond what we see, to a life in which we may at least hope to take part.
What is more, I think that Christ and indeed other spiritually gifted men see further and truer than I do, I wish to follow them as far as I can. He was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research, he remained open to the possibility of supernatural phenomena. Rayleigh was the president of the SPR in 1919, he gave a presidential address in the year of his death but did not come to any definite conclusions. The lunar crater Rayleigh as well as the Martian crater Rayleigh were named in his honour; the asteroid 22740 Rayleigh was named after him on 1 June 2007. A type of surface waves are known as Rayleigh waves; the rayl, a unit of specific acoustic impedance, is named for him. Rayleigh was awarded with: Smith's Prize Royal Medal Matteucci Medal Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Copley Medal Nobel Prize for Physics Elliott Cresson Medal Rumford Medal Lord Rayleigh was among the original recipients of the O
Albert A. Michelson
Albert Abraham Michelson FFRS HFRSE was an American physicist known for his work on measuring the speed of light and for the Michelson–Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, becoming the first American to win the Nobel Prize in a science. Michelson was born in Strzelno, Province of Posen in Germany, the son of Samuel Michelson and his wife, Rozalia Przyłubska, both of Jewish descent, he moved to the US at the age of two. He grew up in the mining towns of Murphy's Camp and Virginia City, where his father was a merchant, his family was Jewish by birth but non-religious, Michelson himself was a lifelong agnostic. He spent his high school years in San Francisco in the home of his aunt, Henriette Levy, the mother of author Harriet Lane Levy. President Ulysses S. Grant awarded Michelson a special appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy in 1869. During his four years as a midshipman at the Academy, Michelson excelled in optics, heat and drawing. After graduating in 1873 and two years at sea, he returned to the Naval Academy in 1875 to become an instructor in physics and chemistry until 1879.
In 1879, he was posted to Washington, to work with Simon Newcomb. In the following year he obtained leave of absence to continue his studies in Europe, he visited the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, the Collège de France and École Polytechnique in Paris. In 1877, he married Margaret Hemingway, daughter of a wealthy New York stockbroker and lawyer and the niece of his commander William T. Sampson, they had a daughter. Michelson was fascinated with the sciences, the problem of measuring the speed of light in particular. While at Annapolis, he conducted his first experiments of the speed of light, as part of a class demonstration in 1877, his Annapolis experiment was refined, in 1879, he measured the speed of light in air to be 299,864 ± 51 kilometres per second, estimated the speed of light in vacuum as 299,940 km/s, or 186,380 mi/s. After two years of studies in Europe, he resigned from the Navy in 1881. In 1883 he accepted a position as professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland and concentrated on developing an improved interferometer.
In 1887 he and Edward Morley carried out the famous Michelson–Morley experiment which failed to detect evidence of the existence of the luminiferous ether. He moved on to use astronomical interferometers in the measurement of stellar diameters and in measuring the separations of binary stars. In 1889 Michelson became a professor at Clark University at Worcester, Massachusetts and in 1892 was appointed professor and the first head of the department of physics at the newly organized University of Chicago. In 1898, he noted the Gibbs phenomenon in Fourier analysis on a mechanical computer, constructed by him. In 1907, Michelson had the honor of being the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid", he won the Copley Medal in 1907, the Henry Draper Medal in 1916 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1923. A crater on the Moon is named after him. Michelson died in Pasadena, California at the age of 78.
The University of Chicago Residence Halls remembered Michelson and his achievements by dedicating'Michelson House' in his honor. Case Western Reserve has dedicated a Michelson House to him, Michelson Hall at the United States Naval Academy bears his name. Clark University named a theatre after him. Michelson Laboratory at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in Ridgecrest, California is named for him. There is a display in the publicly accessible area of the Lab which includes facsimiles of Michelson's Nobel Prize medal, the prize document, examples of his diffraction gratings. Numerous awards and honors have been created in Albert A. Michelson's name; some of the current awards and lectures named for Michelson include the following: the Bomem-Michelson Award and Lecture annually presented until 2017 by the Coblentz Society. A. Michelson Award presented every year by the Computer Measurement Group. S. Naval Academy. In 1899, he married Edna Stanton, they raised three daughters. As early as 1869, while serving as an officer in the United States Navy, Michelson started planning a repeat of the rotating-mirror method of Léon Foucault for measuring the speed of light, using improved optics and a longer baseline.
He conducted some preliminary measurements using improvised equipment in 1878, about the same time that his work came to the attention of Simon Newcomb, director of the Nautical Almanac Office, advanced in planning his own study. Michelson's formal experiments took place in June and July 1879, he constructed a frame building along the north sea wall of the Naval Academy to house the machinery. Michelson published his result of 299,910 ± 50 km/s in 1879 before joining Newcomb in Washington DC to assist with his measurements there, thus began a long professional collaboration and friendship between the two. Simon Newcomb, with his more adequately funded project, obtained a value of 299,860 ±
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science and located in Menlo Park, California. SLAC research centers on a broad program in atomic and solid-state physics, chemistry and medicine using X-rays from synchrotron radiation and a free-electron laser as well as experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics, astroparticle physics, cosmology. Founded in 1962 as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the facility is located on 172 hectares of Stanford University-owned land on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California—just west of the University's main campus; the main accelerator is 3.2 kilometers long—the longest linear accelerator in the world—and has been operational since 1966. Research at SLAC has produced three Nobel Prizes in Physics: 1976: The charm quark—see J/ψ meson 1990: Quark structure inside protons and neutrons 1995: The tau leptonSLAC's meeting facilities provided a venue for the Homebrew Computer Club and other pioneers of the home computer revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1984 the laboratory was named an ASME National Historic Engineering Landmark and an IEEE Milestone. SLAC developed and, in December 1991, began hosting the first World Wide Web server outside of Europe. In the early-to-mid 1990s, the Stanford Linear Collider investigated the properties of the Z boson using the Stanford Large Detector; as of 2005, SLAC employed over 1,000 people, some 150 of whom were physicists with doctorate degrees, served over 3,000 visiting researchers yearly, operating particle accelerators for high-energy physics and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory for synchrotron light radiation research, "indispensable" in the research leading to the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Stanford Professor Roger D. Kornberg. In October 2008, the Department of Energy announced that the Center's name would be changed to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; the reasons given include a better representation of the new direction of the lab and the ability to trademark the laboratory's name.
Stanford University had opposed the Department of Energy's attempt to trademark "Stanford Linear Accelerator Center". In March 2009 it was announced that the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory was to receive $68.3 Million in Recovery Act Funding to be disbursed by Department of Energy's Office of Science. The main accelerator was an RF linear accelerator that accelerated electrons and positrons up to 50 GeV. At 3.2 km long, the accelerator was the longest linear accelerator in the world, was claimed to be "the world's most straight object." Until 2017 when the European x-ray free electron laser opened. The main accelerator is buried 9 m below ground and passes underneath Interstate Highway 280; the above-ground klystron gallery atop the beamline is the longest building in the United States. A portion of the original linear accelerator is now part of the Linac Coherent Light Source; the Stanford Linear Collider was a linear accelerator that collided electrons and positrons at SLAC. The center of mass energy was about 90 GeV, equal to the mass of the Z boson, which the accelerator was designed to study.
Grad student Barrett D. Milliken discovered the first Z event on 12 April 1989 while poring over the previous day's computer data from the Mark II detector; the bulk of the data was collected by the SLAC Large Detector, which came online in 1991. Although overshadowed by the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN, which began running in 1989, the polarized electron beam at SLC made certain unique measurements possible, such as parity violation in Z Boson-b quark coupling. Presently no beam enters the south and north arcs in the machine, which leads to the Final Focus, therefore this section is mothballed to run beam into the PEP2 section from the beam switchyard; the SLAC Large Detector was the main detector for the Stanford Linear Collider. It was designed to detect Z bosons produced by the accelerator's electron-positron collisions; the SLD operated from 1992 to 1998. PEP began operation in 1980, with center-of-mass energies up to 29 GeV. At its apex, PEP had five large particle detectors in operation, as well as a sixth smaller detector.
About 300 researchers made used of PEP. PEP stopped operating in 1990, PEP-II began construction in 1994. From 1999 to 2008, the main purpose of the linear accelerator was to inject electrons and positrons into the PEP-II accelerator, an electron-positron collider with a pair of storage rings 2.2 km in circumference. PEP-II was host to the BaBar experiment, one of the so-called B-Factory experiments studying charge-parity symmetry; the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource is a synchrotron light user facility located on the SLAC campus. Built for particle physics, it was used in experiments where the J/ψ meson was discovered, it is now used for materials science and biology experiments which take advantage of the high-intensity synchrotron radiation emitted by the stored electron beam to study the structure of molecules. In the early 1990s, an independent electron injector was built for this storage ring, allowing it to operate independently of the main linear accelerator. SLAC plays a primary role in the mission and operation of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched in August 2008.
The principal scientific objectives of this mission are: To understand the mechanisms of particle acceleration in AGNs, SNRs. To resolve the gamma-ray sky: unidentified sources and diffuse emiss
Karl Ferdinand Braun
Karl Ferdinand Braun was a German inventor and Nobel laureate in physics. Braun contributed to the development of radio and television technology: he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi "for their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy". Braun was born in Fulda and educated at the University of Marburg and received a Ph. D. from the University of Berlin in 1872. In 1874 he discovered, he became director of the Physical Institute and professor of physics at the University of Strassburg in 1895. In 1897 he built the first cathode-ray cathode ray tube oscilloscope. CRT became the cornerstone in developing electronic television. In early 21st century, the flat screen technologies began to replace the CRT technology on both television sets and computer monitors; the CRT is still called the "Braun tube" in German-speaking countries and other countries such as Korea and Japan. During the development of radio, he worked on wireless telegraphy. In 1897 Braun joined the line of wireless pioneers.
His major contributions were the introduction of a closed tuned circuit in the generating part of the transmitter, its separation from the radiating part by means of inductive coupling, on the usage of crystals for receiving purposes. Around 1898, he invented a crystal detector. Wireless telegraphy claimed Dr. Braun's full attention in 1898, for many years after that he applied himself exclusively to the task of solving its problems. Dr. Braun had written extensively on wireless subjects and was well known through his many contributions to the Electrician and other scientific journals. In 1899, he would apply for the patent Wireless electro transmission of signals over surfaces.. In 1899, he is said to have applied for a patent on Electro telegraphy by means of condensers and induction coils. Pioneers working on wireless devices came to a limit of distance they could cover. Connecting the antenna directly to the spark gap produced only a damped pulse train. There were only a few cycles before oscillations ceased.
Braun's circuit afforded a much longer sustained oscillation because the energy encountered less losses swinging between coil and Leyden Jars. And by means of inductive antenna coupling the radiator was better matched to the generator; the resultant stronger and less bandwidth consuming signals bridged a much longer distance. Braun invented the phased array antenna in 1905, he described in his Nobel Prize lecture how he arranged three antennas to transmit a directional signal. This invention led to the development of radar, smart antennas, MIMO. Braun's British patent on tuning was used by Marconi in many of his tuning patents. Guglielmo Marconi used Braun's patents. Marconi would admit to Braun himself that he had "borrowed" portions of Braun's work. In 1909 Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Marconi for "contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy." The prize awarded to Braun in 1909 depicts this design. Braun experimented at first at the University of Strasbourg. Not before long he bridged a distance of 42 km to the city of Mutzig.
In spring 1899 Braun, accompanied by his colleagues Cantor and Zenneck, went to Cuxhaven to continue their experiments at the North Sea. On 24 September 1900 radio telegraphy signals were exchanged with the island of Heligoland over a distance of 62 km. Light vessels in the river Elbe and a coast station at Cuxhaven commenced a regular radio telegraph service. Braun went to the United States at the beginning of World War I to help defend the German wireless station at Sayville, New York, against attacks by the British-controlled Marconi Corporation. After the US entered the war, Braun was detained, but could move within Brooklyn, New York. Braun died in his house in Brooklyn, before the war ended in 1918. In 1987 the Society for Information Display created the Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize, awarded for an outstanding technical achievement in display technology. U. S. Patent 0,750,429, Wireless Electric Transmission of Signals Over Surfaces U. S. Patent 0,763,345, Means for Tuning and Adjusting Electric Circuits History of radio Invention of radio Edouard Branly Footnotes In the anime adaptation of the 2009 Japanese visual novel, Steins.
Braun', uses the pseudonym'FB', after Karl Ferdinand Braun. GeneralK. F. Braun: "On the current conduction in metal sulphides", Ann. Phys. Chem. 153, 556. An English translation can be found in "Semiconductor Devices: Pioneering Papers", edited by S. M. Sze, World Scientific, Singapore, 1991, pp. 377–380. Keller, Peter A.: The cathode-ray tube: technology and applications. New York: Palisades Press, 1991. ISBN 0-9631559-0-3. Keller, Peter A.: "The 100th Anniversary of the Cathode-Ray Tube," Information Display, Vol. 13, No. 10, 1997, pp. 28–32. F. Kurylo: "Ferdinand Braun Leben und Wirken des Erfinders der Braunschen Röhre Nobelpreis 1909", München: Moos Verlag, 1965. Karl Ferdinand Braun at the Mathematics Genealogy Project "Ferdinand Braun – Biography". Nobel Lectures. Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967. Naughton, Russell, "Karl Ferdinand Braun, Dr: 1850 - 1918". "Karl Ferdinand Braun ". Biographies of Famous Electrochemists and Physicists Contributed to Understanding of Electricity.
"Karl Ferdinand Braun, 1850-1918". The Ferdinand-Braun-
Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun (2016)
