For a nuclear physicist to include a stroll through an almond grove as part of his research may seem a bit peculiar. Unless, of course, the physicist works at the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California at Davis, where unusual is the norm. In the name of physics--and in the pursuit of paying customers--Crocker scientists have done everything from trudging through dusty lake beds to poring over ancient manuscripts. They have studied the ink in the famed Gutenberg Bible, tracked the source of air pollution in the Grand Canyon, verified the handwriting of Johann Sebastian Bach, and analyzed the smoke from burning Kuwaiti oil wells. For two decades now, as long as the project has called for good, solid everyday science, the Crocker group has been happy to fire up its small particle accelerator for a cost that’s now just $384 an hour (volume discounts available).
We’re the McDonald’s hamburger of elemental analysis, jokes Davis nuclear physicist Thomas Cahill.
Cahill and colleagues have made the Crocker lab internationally recognized as a place where a standard cyclotron is used in nonstandard ways. We attract people who are bored by doing repetitive, traditional work, says Crocker director Robert Flocchini, the physicist who’s been analyzing the blowing dust clouds raised by California almond growers; he hopes to settle a furious dispute over the extent to which agricultural dust contributes to the often gritty air of the state’s heavily farmed Central Valley.
While its choices have made the Crocker somewhat low-profile in the high-powered community of traditional particle physicists (Do they have a cyclotron at UC Davis? asked one surprised physicist from Stanford’s powerful linear accelerator program), outside that inner circle the laboratory shines brightly. Cahill, who heads the Crocker’s atmospheric research program, visited 13 countries last year, ranging from Australia to Chile, helping establish environmental analysis programs at particle accelerator centers. Besides making themselves accessible, the Crocker scientists hope to leave a legacy of accelerators around the planet, all joined into a network of sophisticated monitoring stations. Already the idea is catching on: the National Park Service relies on the Crocker to keep watch over pollution in its parks, and the World Meteorological Organization has adopted the Crocker’s analytic techniques for its pollution monitoring network. Cahill, at 56, has visions of recruiting a whole generation of physicists to keep tabs on Planet Earth: What do I want out of this? he asks slowly and then grins. I want to be the Pied Piper of environmental physics.
That kind of ambition has always characterized the Crocker. The laboratory came to Davis in 1965, three years after university physicist John Jungerman discovered that the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory had a 220- ton magnet going to waste. The Berkeley group, busy building a new accelerator, regarded the magnet as a historic relic, an aging five-foot- wide chunk of (slightly) radioactive metal. The magnet had served as the core of the pioneering cyclotron built by physicist Ernest O. Lawrence in 1939, famed as one of the machines used to help develop the atomic bomb.
