Los Alamos: Moving Beyond the Manhattan Project

Blueprints of the atomic bombs developed at Los Alamos during World War II are on sale today in the town's bookstore.

No tour of American science would be complete without a stop in Los Alamos, New Mexico. From 1943 to 1945, the U.S. government sequestered many of the world’s leading physicists on this high desert plateau under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers Manhattan Engineer District with the mission to build an atomic bomb before the end of World War II. Until they accomplished their goal, hundreds of scientists, along with their families and a large administrative and technical staff, disappeared from their former lives, leaving behind only an address for a P.O. Box in Santa Fe, New Mexico. (You can check out all their staff badge photos here.)

While most of Los Alamos’s new inhabitants left soon after the use of their invention ended World War II, some stayed. The town of Los Alamos soon became a place with real addresses, accessible roads, great mountain biking, and some of the best public schools in the state of New Mexico. But it still carries the weight of its history, with blueprints of Little Boy and Fat Man (the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) for sale in the town bookstore, and classified weapons research ongoing at the lab. We went there not really sure what we would be allowed to see or how we would feel about it. But while the history was problematic, the current (unclassified) science we saw exhibited many of the same traits we observed at other labs: creativity, ingenuity, and a lot of foil.

Upon observing the success of the Trinity "gadget" on July 16th, 1945, Oppenheimer visibly relaxed years of built-up tension then quoted a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Success it was: just 0.025 seconds after detonation, the explosion was several hundred meters across. As physicist Kenneth Brainbridge remarked: "Now we are all sons of bitches."

A closer look at RHIC

A panoramic view of the PHENIX detector's building and counting house. To the left, an entrance to RHIC's particle beam ring is visible. When access is required, the enormous concrete slabs that block the entrance are removed with a crane to expose the route into the tunnel.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven is a medium-to-high-energy machine that plays a unique role in the study of the early universe. While most particle accelerators collide single particles (like protons and antiprotons in the case Fermilab’s Tevatron), RHIC’s main purpose is to collide gold nuclei, each of which contains 79 protons.

Why the additional mass? The results of a proton-antiproton collision usually look something like this:

A proton-antiproton collision at the Tevatron (courtesy of Rockefeller University/CDF)

Gold ion collisions produce tracks like this:

A gold ion collision at RHIC (courtesy of RHIC, found on Wikipedia)