CEA Seeks New Life from Ruins

Sometime next month a switch will be thrown at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, sending light flooding into the experimental hall that has been dark since last July's explosion. For many Harvard and M.I.T. physicists it will signal the start of a million dollar gamble.

The physicists have proposed that part of the accelerator be converted into a vast apparatus for high-energy physics--the most powerful equipment of its kind in the world. A successful high-energy laboratory, they believe, could make Harvard M.I.T. the most important physics research center in the country.

Million Dollar Breakthrough

"We can't be sure, but the possibilities seem immense for our making a breakthrough, a real contribution," M. Stanley Livingstone, CEA director, said in an interview last week.

The Atomic Energy Commission is now studying the CEA request for $1 million to build the apparatus. Because this is less than one-tenth the cost of earlier plans submitted by the CEA--and by other laboratories--the commission is believed likely to accept it.

With these funds, the CEA could begin running high energy experiments by the fall of 1968. Many of the experiments have already been thought out. They will test the basic laws of physics--and, according to Francis M. Pipkin, professor of Physics, they may break them.

"Until now, we've studied cases that confirmed our theory--quantum electrodynamics--and that's been the end of it," Pipkin explained. "We know of events the theory doesn't predict accurately, but we can't do anything with them if we can't correct the theory.

Proving the Point

"Now, with this apparatus, we may be able to produce enough energy to see, for example, whether an electron is really a point, as the theory assumes. And we may find instead that it has structure, that it has a radius."

The higher energy would come from the collision of two moving subnuclear particles--an electron and a positron. Normal accelerator experiments send a particle into a stationary target. But these cohisions, Pipkin said, can only take place in a "ring" where both particles are stored--which could cost as much as $16 million to build. The CEA instead would make a giant storage ring out of its accelerator by adding an injector for positrons to the present one for electrons. The two particles would rotate in opposite directions. At a given point the two streams could be made to collide and the collision tracked and studied.

Pipkin's experiments and several others that were being conducted at the CEA last July were designed to prepare for high energy physics. But almost all of them have been at a standstill for five months. "We've lost some time," Pipkin said. "Our academic progress since the explosion has been zero."

Some graduate students were able to spend the Fall re-designing their experiments, but others have had little to do, according to Richard Wilson, professor of Physics. "It's difficult for those who weren't working in June, but were scheduled for the next round of experiments," Wilson explained. "And they won't be able to get started when the hall re-opens