At a recent symposium honoring former Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Director Jonathan Dorfan, dinner guests were treated to a course of the unexpected.
In May 1983, physicists on the UA1 detector for the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator at CERN made the first definitive observations of the Z boson.
A Faraday Cup is (pick one) 1) a gadget named after the great experimentalist Michael Faraday, used to measure the current of a charged-particle beam, or 2) an award that recognizes the inventors of innovative instruments for particle accelerators.
When you hear the descending flurry of 16th notes in the trumpets, you know the gamma rays are coming. They speed toward the detector in the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope in chromatically harmonized notes.