In order to enhance the tour experience, the lab had a video produced to explain the operation and purpose of the lab. For that video, the Theory Center transfered 10 minutes of computer animations onto video tape. The original computer animations were produced by Chris Jones and Tom Beach.
Purpose: Give a quick introduction to CESR (Cornell Electron-positron Storage Ring) and show its function.
Image #1: Exterior shot which shows the Synchrotron in the right foreground, the Storage Ring to the left, and the CLEO II detector in the center of the image sticking up behind the Synchrotron.
Image #2: Inside the Storage Ring's beam pipe. The glowing purple ellipse represents a beam of billions of positrons (the electron's anti-particle) which has just passed the camera and is heading down the pipe to eventually collide with a beam of electrons.
Purpose: Demonstrate the relative sizes of the particles studied by the laboratory. The animation slowly zooms in to show each new layer of nature.
Purpose: Show that only two types of quarks (the Up and the Down) and one type of lepton (the electron) are present in ordinary matter. All other quarks and leptons are only produced in the collisions that take place in particle accelerators.
Purpose: Explain the two different types of hadrons, where a hadron is a particle which contains quarks.
Purpose: Explain the relationship between matter and anti-matter.
Anti-matter is a kind of mirror image of matter. When a particle of matter collides with its anti-matter partner the two particles are destroyed and the energy released in their destruction is used to create new particles.
Accelerator Overview (2300k mpeg)
Purpose: Show the physical relationship between the three components of CESR and the CLEO II detector. In the video, each of the sections lights up when the announcer talks about it.
Image #1: The Linear Accelerator. Creates the electron and positron beams, begins their acceleration, and injects them into the Synchrotron.
Image #2: The Synchrotron. As the beam goes round and round it is accelerated to its final energy and then is injected into the Storage Ring.
Image #3: The Storage Ring. The positron beam circles clockwise and the electron beam circles counter-clockwise inside the beam pipe. The two beams are allowed to collide inside the CLEO detector.
Image #4: The CLEO II Detector Tracks and measures all of the particles that are created when the electron and positron beams collide.
Purpose:Show the beam as it comes out of the electron gun and then watch the beam get compressed in the prebuncher from a length of three feet down to the thickness of a dime.
Image #1: This is a close up of the electron gun, with the electron beam (blue) just emerging.
Image #2: This frame is later in the animation, where the camera has moved back and to the left to show the beam as it is compressed in the prebuncher.
RF Accelerator Cutaway (2500k mpeg)
Purpose:Demonstrate how the beams are accelerated using a Radio Frequency Cavity.
Image: This is a cut away of one of the eight Acceleration Cavities in the Linear Accelerator. The Acceleration Cavity is composed of cavities, where the powerful electric field from a radio wave (depicted as the purple cones) oscillates back and forth. When a beam (the blue sphere) enters the cavity, the electric field accelerates it in the same direction that the field is pointing.
Purpose:Show how positrons (the electron's anti-matter partner) are made.
Image #1: The electron beam (glowing blue sphere) just before it strikes a heavy metal target placed in its path.
Image #2: When the electron beam struck the target, it created many electron(blue)/positron(pink) pairs. These particles are then collected and accelerated down the rest of the Linear Accelerator. The acceleration cavities are adjusted so that only the positrons can make it all the way to the end.
CESR @ 5,000,000,000 EV (550k mpeg)
Purpose:Give a sense of scale to the accelerator by comparing the relative energy an electron would get if it were accelerated by a battery, a T.V. or the Synchrotron.
Image #1: Shows an electron being accelerated between two plates. The plates have a voltage difference of 1 volt. The amount of energy that the electron gets by going from one plate to the other is 1 electron Volt (eV).
Image #2: Inside a television, the electron beam gains an energy of 20,000 eV.
Image #3: The synchrotron elevates the beams to 5 Billion electron volts.
Purpose:Cut open the CLEO II detector to see the layers of different sub-detectors inside of it.
The CLEO II detector is used to measure the particles produced in the electron-positron collisions. These measurements are performed by a series of specialized sub-detectors within CLEO II.
Purpose: Show how a the path of a charged particle can be measured using a gas.
When a charged particle (shown in the video as a large blue sphere) passes through a gas, it knocks the electrons (the small blue spheres) off of the gas molecules. In the CLEO II detector, these "knocked off" electrons are captured by many wires which are strung through out the gas chamber. In the video, the wires which collect the electrons change to color to red. By measuring the number of electrons each wire collects we can measure the path the particle took.
Purpose: Explain how the CLEO II detector determines the type of particle which were created in the collision.
Different types of particles interact with the CLEO II detector in different ways. The video clip shows two different interactions