The history of electron-electron interaction using colliding beams commenced in 1956 when the late G.K. O'Neill of Princeton University became interested in highenergy collisions among a variety of particles and introduced the general notion of a complex of an accelerator or accelerators injecting into a storage ring or storage rings. Prior to O'Neill's initiatives the use of particle beam-beam collisions had been suggested for some time, and it is impossible to trace the history of these ideas. The earliest publication with which I am familiar came from a Russian source in the mid-1920's. The great accelerator pioneer, Rolf Wideroe, obtained a German patent in 1953 on specific construction ideas for colliding beam machines. Not much came of any of this until O'Neill decided that the most promising injector into colliding beam machines would be the MARK III electron linear accelerator at Stanford, then operating at 700 MeV. He talked to me about sponsoring such a development at the High Energy Physics Laboratory at Stanford in 1957, and I agreed to do so. To make such a collaboration between Princeton and Stanford into a practical enterprise, I felt some local talent should be involved, and a certain young post-doc by the name of Burton Richter was easily persuaded to join, as was W. G. Barber, who had demonstrated his practical abilities in machine construction in connection with the smaller MARK II accelerator at Stanford. In turn, O'Neill was joined by Bernie Gittleman, then at Princeton, who carried the heavy burden in designing the complex vacuum system of the collider. The collaboration produced a proposal in May 1958, which was submitted to the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and I was able to obtain financial support for what was at that time the most expensive single experiment ONR had ever supported. Both theoretical design and orbitry proceeded, and construction advanced rapidly. The first beam was stored on March 28, 1962, and the first physics results were presented in 1963. This machine generated results in particle physics but perhaps even more important, it was a major advance in the storage ring arts. I personally participated only in the design of the magnet and its rather complex magnetic circuitry, and also did a wrong calculation on beam-beam multiple scattering. Others studied the beam-beam interaction, again generally incorrectly, but leading to the important concept of a tune-shift limit which could not be exceeded. Moreover, injection,
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Dec 18, 2000
L H A Leunissen + 2
Open Access
