The Initial Experimental Program of Slac

The experimental program to be carried out with the two-mile-long 20-GeV electron beam produced at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the associated experimental apparatus have been designed to take full advantage of the unique features of this accelerator. These have been described in detail in the previous article and so only the main qualitative features are listed here: 1. Highest energy and intensity of electrons and photons. 2. Highest energy and intensity of positrons. 3. Very small phase volume of electron beams. 4. Highest intensity and purity of muon beams of quite high energy. A slight qualification should be made to the above since in principle one could obtain higher energies at the large proton accelerators of Brookhaven or CERN from-ir " decay into gamma rays and occasionally into electron-positron pairs, but the intensities are so low that only a very limited class of experiments has so far been attempted. There has also been a considerable amount of thought given to the production by electrons of beams of strongly interacting particles, namely, ?s, K's and anti-protons, which was not contemplated at the time of the original Stanford Proposal. 1,2, 3 Such production, however, is not considered a unique feature of this accelerator because it turns out that, while these beams will be competitive (for some experiments) with similar beams at the large proton accelerators,