Goodbye to the Bevatron

Audio Report on Apr 20, 2009 by KQED QUEST staff from QUEST Northern California
Topics: Astronomy, Physics, Radio

For the last 18 years, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, up in the Berkeley hills, has had the physics equivalent of a rusty pickup truck parked in its front yard. The Bevatron is a 1950's-era atom smasher that was decommissioned in 1993.

Now, the Bevatron is being demolished — by the end of this year, it will be gone. And with it, a chapter in the Bay Area's history of high level physics research, as Amy Standen reports.

Additional Links

• Article: Goodbye to the Bevatron
• More Bevatron
• A is for Atom