No, it isn't some fancy acronym from a Command & Conquer video game. It's the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany and I went to visit it Friday afternoon. They have a linear accelerator (UNILAC), the accelerating synchrotron (SIS), the Experiment Storage Ring (ESR) and Fragment Separator (FRS). It also has several other experiments set up along with a tumor therapy room. Lest all this sound uninteresting, this is the place that put elements 107-112 on the periodic table! Meitnerium (1982), Hassium (1984), Darmstadtium (1994), Roentgenium (1994), Bohrium (1996), and Copernicium (1996) were all created/discovered here. Ha! And I stood next to the machines that did it. It was astonishing.
That tumor therapy contraption was pretty interesting as well. Heavy ion beams are shot at a person's head for example. The beam is made up of carbon ions, instead of the old X-ray, and these ions release all of their energy at one particular point. Here is a picture of the Bragg Curve courtesy of Wikipedia.
This particular curve is for alpha particles, but X-rays don't even have that peak. They only gradually die out in energy. Carbon ions, on the other hand, have an even sharper peak than the one in this picture. That means the technicians and scientists know exactly where, distance-wise, the ion will release all of its energy after leaving the vacuum area of the accelerator. If they hold your head still, they have millimeter precision with targeting and destroying a tumor. Kind of crazy when you think about it. I would feel a little nervous about having my head at the butt end of a particle beam that just got up to 90% light speed in 2 seconds.
This picture of the facility (sorry it's a little hard to read) was taken from the GSI page linked to here. In it you can see the blue part is the existing facility which I got to walk through (mostly). The red is the future and it will be awesome. With the things they can already do, I can only imagine what they'll find out with more experiments and more powerful accelerators. I said 'mostly' earlier because they had experiments going on at the time we were there, meaning the accelerators were active and that means everything was bottled up because of radiation. A few experiments were not being used so we did get to see some of the detectors up close and personal. The other experiments were trapped behind locked gates with radiation 'airlock' rooms and meters worth of concrete walls. I'm hoping to get to go back and see it again. I still don't get particle physics, because I'm just a simple astronomer, but I do appreciate the complicated stuff they do here to better understand the universe.
By the by, the tumor therapy room is just below and a little to the left of the ESR ring.
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