Last October, when the House of Representatives voted to cut off funding for the 54-mile-round Superconducting Supercollider in Texas, it killed what was to have been the world's largest accelerator--one of those colossal machines designed to examine the behavior of subatomic particles by racing them to near light speed around enormous underground tracks. The attention of the disappointed physics community reverted to the current world champion, the Large Electron Positron collider, or LEP, which occupies a 17-mile tunnel under the Jura Mountains near Geneva, Switzerland.
LEP's name notwithstanding, size is just about the least significant attribute of a particle accelerator.
Depending on the questions accelerators are designed to address, a number of much more relevant criteria give other machines the edge over LEP. In fact, even as the mammoth project in Texas is winding down, accelerator builders in Virginia are putting the finishing touches on a device that is no ...
