From the New York Times Science Section:
Ever since 1989, in a collection of buildings occupying about a city block in Beijing, Chinese physicists have been quietly shooting electrons and their evil-twin opposites ” positrons ” around a 80-yard-diameter underground track at nearly the speed of light, and then banging them together in little fireballs of energy.
Over the years, the work at the Beijing collider has produced results that are critical to efforts on the frontier of particle physics at more famous and much larger accelerators ” those that have racetracks miles around and trillion-electron-volt energies, like the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known as Fermilab, outside Chicago, and the Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to open next year at the CERN laboratory near Geneva. [Full text]
