The MIT Bates Linear Accelerator will be open to the public on Sunday, May 20 from noon-4pm.
Many of the 75 scientific and technical personnel will be on hand to greet visitors and show them around the facility. Visitors will be able to view the large-scale spectrometers OOPS (Out Of Plane Spectrometer) and BLAST (Bates Large Acceptance Spectrometer Toroid) in the South Experimental Hall, visit the Central Control Room and try their hand at a scientific demonstration. More than 250 visitors attended the last open house in 1999.
The MIT-Bates facility consists of a 1 GeV (one billion electron volt) pulsed linear accelerator feeding the South Hall Ring and is used in frontier research in electromagnetic physics.
The central research focus at Bates is the study of fundamental properties of the proton, including its magnetism and shape. The new BLAST detector is being built to probe the fundamental properties of matter (see MIT Tech Talk, November 25, 1998).
The facility is located at 21 Manning Ave. in Middleton, off Route 62W. It is easily reached from Routes 128 and 95 and Route 1 north. Comfortable walking shoes are recommended for the open house, and children must be accompanied by an adult. For more information and directions, go to the Bates web site or call x3-9200.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 2, 2001.
