Soviet Champ

The Russians now have the world's most powerful particle accelerator. Last week Soviet scientists announced that the great proton synchrotron in the village of Dubna near Moscow has gone into operation and is generating protons with 8.3 billion electron-volts of energy. This beats the 6 billion-volt Bevatron at Berkeley, Calif, by a comfortable margin, and the Russian scientists are confident that their machine will soon reach its designed power of ten Bev.

The Russian machine is mostly a scaled-up copy of the Berkeley Bevatron and the Cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory. N.Y. It contains some new gadgets, but uses no novel principle. Most notable thing about it is its enormous size. Its ring of magnets is 184 ft. in diameter and contains 36,000 tons of steel. According to U.S. Physicist Luis Alvarez, who visited Dubna last spring, Russian physicists joke a little about the amount of steel. The Iron Curtain, they told him, was melted down to provide it.

The Russians will hold the high-energy title until the completion, probably in 1960, of the 25-Bev machine now under construction at Brookhaven. It will be big (840 ft. in diameter), but its greatly increased power will be made possible by a new principle called "strong focusing." It will need 500 tons of copper and only a small amount of steel.

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