Too many pages?

Noah Jansson doesn't like to throw back his catches. So when the five-year-old went fishing last week at Fermilab and caught a cell-phone, he kept it. "My son cast out his line and said "oh it's stuck," maybe 20 feet out in the water," said father Andreas Jansson. "He'd hooked on a cell phone with a leather case."

Jansson senior, who is Swedish, came to Fermilab four years ago to work in the Tevatron Department. He says his son became interested in fishing after catching a pike on vacation. "Back home in Sweden he caught a tiny little pike--probably about five inches long and an inch wide," said Jansson. "He was pretty excited and insisted on eating it, but didn't taste too good."

After that trip, the father and son started fishing in the Fermilab ponds, and last Saturday they decided to take advantage of the nice weather and fish again. They were used to catching bass, bluegill and catfish at Fermilab--but a cell phone they were not planning on. "It's funny that there was a cell phone 20 feet out in the lake," said Jansson. "Someone must have thrown it....Maybe they got paged too much."

Butter in the beam

Dear FT:
I have been pondering a scientific question:

What would happen if someone stuck a stick of butter into a particle accelerator?

Regards,
Aaron M. Boruff

Dear Aaron,

The short answer is that you would mess up the butter, you would mess up the beam of particles, and you would mess up the accelerator. In case you want to know more, I'll tell you a little about how each of those would happen.

First, we'll look at the butter. Every time one of the fast-moving particles in the accelerator would go though the stick of butter, the particle would kick some of the electrons in the atoms of the butter, giving them energy. (The nuclei of the atoms would also get a little energy, but not nearly so much.) The electrons' energy would become heat in the butter, first warming up the part of the stick that the beam was going through, then melting it, and finally vaporizing it. Depending just which accelerator the butter was in and how hard we were running it, we would make a hole through the stick in around a millisecond, give or take a few factors of ten, messing up the butter.

What about the particle beam? As the particles traveled through the butter, they would be nudged a little in random directions, so they would start to spread out. The beam would get bigger. At the energies Fermilab runs at, this wouldn't be a very large effect the first time through the butter, but most of our accelerators are rings where the particles loop around and around. Even with just a little nudge each time around, quite quickly the beam would grow to the point that it would scrape on the walls of the accelerator and be lost, messing up the beam.

Finally we must consider what a stick of butter might do to the accelerator. From what I have already said, you can tell that having anything in the beam of particles is generally not a good idea for running the accelerator. In fact, this is so important that we even try to suck all air out of the pipe that the beam travels in so that the particles don't scatter from the air molecules, let alone the molecules in a stick of butter. We have several kinds of fancy pumps to pull the air molecules out, but we have to start with very clean pipes. After cleaning components, we wear gloves when we handle anything that will go into the accelerator because the oil in our fingerprints gets into pipes, floats around, and disturbs the particle beam. You can imagine that a whole stick of butter would create a colossal mess.

Your question is very much like the questions scientists have been asking ever since we figured out how to make beams of particles over a hundred years ago, even before we knew what made up the beams. Over the years the standard experiment has been to make a beam by one means or another, let it smash into something, and study the interaction between the beam and the target. One way of doing that is to take our beam of particles out of the accelerator and let it smash into an external fixed target. If you wanted to study the interaction of the particles and a stick of butter, that would be the way to do the experiment.