 The National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory. (Biz Herman for The Washington Post) If you haven't read it yet, I encourage you to check out "Science Trip" — 12 destinations in the Lower 48 states where the public can observe science in action. I traveled to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and poked around the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. At the collider, physicists speed up gold particles to nearly the speed of light and extinguish them in a head-on crash, unleashing heat and subatomic particles. Equally as impressive was the National Synchrotron Light Source II, a powerful X-ray microscope. There, an electron gun fires electrons into a ring, where the particles accelerate along a track with a circumference of 2,600 feet. (The building is so large that workers ride tricycles indoors, to cut down on travel time.) As the electrons zoom around the building, they shake off radiation. The effect was described to me like droplets flung from a wet dishrag whipped overhead, if the radiation were droplets and electrons the rag. Scientists channel the emitted radiation into dozens of "beam lines." The beams — a variety of X-rays, but thousands of times as potent as ones produced in a doctor's office — zap at objects at the end of the line. Scientists can probe the tiniest contours of nanoscale materials, superconductors, space dust, proteins and other samples. The most sensitive beam line produces what Brookhaven's Synchrotron director, John Hill, said is the smallest X-ray spot in the world, able to focus on details as small as 30 gold atoms strung in a line. It is, therefore, so popular that scientists have to reserve time to use it. Yet, it is so sensitive it can pick up perturbations from the rumble of distant highway traffic. The most in-demand hour, said one Brookhaven scientist, is 3 a.m. on a Sunday, when the rest of Long Island is as still as it gets. |
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