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Smashing Subatomic Particles Together to Better Understand the Smallest Parts of Nature

After 46 years, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) will be getting a new name, one that probably will not include the word "Stanford"—even though the university will continue to run the laboratory.

The existing name is going the way of history, with a new moniker to be announced this fall. Suggestions are being accepted.

The laboratory got its self-descriptive name in 1962, when construction began on the 2-mile-long linear accelerator. It opened for business in 1966, smashing subatomic particles together to better understand the smallest parts of nature. SLAC has always been a federal research facility, operated on a daily basis by Stanford under the terms of a contract with its owner, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Energy Department officials say a name change is needed to reflect a change in the lab's mission, with new emphasis on photon science and particle astrophysics.

But why the disappearance of "Stanford" from the new title? It stems from a trademark disagreement between Stanford and the Energy Department. Last year DOE filed a trademark and copyright application for "Stanford Linear Accelerator Center," part of a larger effort to establish legal protection for the names of DOE labs across the country.

Stanford, however, objected to the trademark request, on grounds that the university owns the rights to "Stanford."

"Both sides have a very rightful position," said Bill Madia, Stanford's vice president for SLAC, and a former director of two DOE labs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

As these issues were "rattling through the system," Madia said, it became clear they might both be solved with a rename that didn't include "Stanford." The lab could get a new, mission-oriented name, and the university would not have to worry about trademark infringement.

But what new name? The decision is ultimately the Energy Department's, but SLAC has a committee working to come up with some suggestions. One oft-discussed idea: Call the lab "SLAC," with the letters no longer standing for any particular words. That's what happened to the Stanford Research Institute, which is now SRI International. That offering is not expected to carry the day, however; an acronym that stands for nothing is not what the DOE has in mind.

Some SLAC employees have attempted to come up with a new name that would still spell S-L-A-C while reflecting the changing research priorities. There is precedent for that on campus, with HEPL. The High-Energy Physics Laboratory became the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory. But with SLAC, the task is more difficult, and no suggestions have caught on, including the idea of having the "S" stand for Sand Hill Road, the lab's home address. Then there is the suggestion that the lab be named in honor of Wolfgang "Pief" Panofsky, the lab's founder and first director.

For the Energy Department, the focus is on finding a name that captures the excitement of new research such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), said Devon Streit of DOE's Office of Laboratory Policy in the Office of Science.

The under-construction LCLS, with stunningly powerful and brief bursts of X-ray laser light, will take freeze-frame snapshots on the nano scale, providing images, for example, of chemical reactions at the molecular level for the first time. The LCLS is expected to have an impact on medicine, electronics, biology, solid-state physics, nanotechnology, energy production and materials science.

"It's going to be a real world-class facility," Streit said.

Suggestions for a new name are coming in from around the world, including overseas physics establishments like CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. There's no frontrunner yet, but there's a chance the new name could include the words "national laboratory," as do some other DOE labs, including the Bay Area's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

A number of the labs have geographical names: Ames, Berkeley, Idaho, Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Savannah River. Menlo Park, the nearest town to SLAC, has a certain coincidental scientific connection, but on the wrong coast. Thomas Edison built his famous laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J.

"Silicon Valley National Laboratory," which has been suggested, is a bit unfocused. "Jasper Ridge National Laboratory" is a favorite of some SLAC employees who appreciate the beauty of the nearby wooded area in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but it says nothing of the lab's mission.

All things being possible, it's at least remotely conceivable that some sort of trademark settlement could be reached between the university and the Energy Department and "Stanford" would find a place in the new name.

About Subatomic Particle
A subatomic particle is an elementary or composite particle smaller than an atom. Particle physics and nuclear physics are concerned with the study of these particles, their interactions, and non-atomic matter.

Subatomic particles include the atomic constituents electrons, protons, and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are composite particles, consisting of quarks. A proton contains two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron consists of one up quark and two down quarks; the quarks are held together in the nucleus by gluons. There are six different types of quark in all ('up', 'down', 'bottom', 'top', 'strange', and 'charm'), as well as other particles including photons and neutrinos which are produced copiously in the sun. Most of the particles that have been discovered are encountered in cosmic rays interacting with matter and are produced by scattering processes in particle accelerators. There are dozens of subatomic particles.

In particle physics, the conceptual idea of a particle is one of several concepts inherited from classical physics, the world we experience, that are used to describe how matter and energy behave at the molecular scales of quantum mechanics. As physicists use the term, the meaning of the word "particle" is one which understands how particles are radically different at the quantum-level, and rather different from the common understanding of the term.

The idea of a particle is one which had to undergo serious rethinking in light of experiments which showed that the smallest particles (of light) could behave just like waves. The difference is indeed vast, and required the new concept of wave-particle duality to state that quantum-scale "particles" are understood to behave in a way which resembles both particles and waves. Another new concept, the uncertainty principle, meant that analyzing particles at these scales required a statistical approach. All of these factors combined such that the very notion of a discrete "particle" has been ultimately replaced by the concept of something like wave-packet of an uncertain boundary, whose properties are only known as probabilities, and whose interactions with other "particles" remain largely a mystery, even 80 years after quantum mechanics was established.

About Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SLAC research program centers on experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics using electron beams and a broad program of research in atomic and solid-state physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine using synchrotron radiation. The 2.0 mile (3.2 kilometer) long underground accelerator is the longest linear accelerator in the world, and is claimed to be "the world's straightest object." SLAC's meeting facilities also provided a venue for the homebrew computer club and other pioneers of the 1980s home computer revolution, and later SLAC hosted the first webpage in the U.S. The above-ground klystron gallery atop the beamline is the longest building in the United States.