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Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile
Something to do with lasers?
Is this "Star Wars" stuff to shoot down missiles or whatever?
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Nope, more of a Large Hadron Collider "light". We take a proton beam accelerated to about 90% of the speed of light and slam it into a liquid mercury "target" and produce neutrons for fundamental physics research, material science, nanophase material science, etc. Basically a $1.5 billion neutron factory.
The size of our beam is much larger than the LHC (ours is roughly 200mm x 70mm where their's is about the size of a pencil) but their's is at a higher power. Here's some info FWIW:
http://neutrons.ornl.gov/aboutsns/aboutsns.shtml
It's actually one of the coolest placest in the world. The amount of technology is staggering. It is actually amazing that it even works.
If the beam could be steered and "fired" like a phaser, it would do some serious damage. We just replaced our "target" a couple of weeks ago (that was my job). Here's a local newspaper article (I'm the guy pointing at the monitor):
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/jul/21/sns-replaces-key-component/