Conference


The Creation of SLAC Leading to 30 Years of Operation

W.K.H. Panofsky

SLAC, Stanford, USA

Abstract

The construction of SLAC is well documented in the well known "Blue Book" edited by Richard B. Neal. The first beam passing the full two-mile length of SLAC was observed more than 30 years ago on May 29, 1966. There has followed 30 years of operation for high energy physics and more recently for synchrotron radiation research.

The operations of SLAC represented a major departure from what was the current practice in high energy physics:

  1. Operation was largely "facility" centered, that is research focused on major pieces of equipment designed specifically to overcome the fundamental difficulties inherent in an electron linear accelerator due to its low duty cycle and high background of uninteresting events.
  2. Average beam power approaching 2 Megawatts was unprecedented for a high energy research tool at the time.
  3. While managed through a single university, SLAC had to be designed as a national facility from the outset.
  4. Due to its high multiplicity of components an unprecedented effort had to be dedicated to achieving reliability. The breadth of the physics applications of the SLAC linac were not foreseen during the initial planing; focus was on continuation of the elastic electron scattering program over preceding machines. The actual program, in particular as amplified through the addition of two generations of storage rings and a linear collider, was much broader encompassing many topics in electron and hadron physics.

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sln 22 April 1996