Quenched! The ISABELLE Saga, I

Abstract

The story of ISABELLE, a colliding-beam accelerator conceived in 1971, officially approved in 1978, partially constructed, and terminated in 1983, is an important episode in the history of postWorld War II science in the United States. The events surrounding its planning, construction, and termination reveal much about the ambitions, strategies, and tensions of American high-energy physicists, their collaborations and rivalries, and the difficulties of funding and constructing a large scientific facility in the age of Big Science. In this article, the first of two parts, I cover the period up to the beginning of construction in 1978. I place ISABELLE in the context of the early history of colliders, outline the physics goals that motivated the machine, and describe the research and motivations behind its innovative but ultimately problematic superconducting magnet design. I cover the key technological and administrative steps that the laboratory took to get the project underway and steer it past several review committees. I also treat some of the conflicts within the laboratory, and between Brookhaven and other laboratories, especially Fermilab, that hampered the project.The story of ISABELLE, a colliding-beam accelerator conceived in 1971, officially approved in 1978, partially constructed, and terminated in 1983, is an important episode in the history of post-World War II science in the United States. The events surrounding its planning, construction, and termination reveal much about the ambitions, strategies, and tensions of American high-energy physicists, their collaborations and rivalries, and the difficulties of funding and constructing a large scientific facility in the age of Big Science. What makes the traumatic story of ISABELLE an especially good portal into the thinking and sociology of physicists of the day is that it seemed the most natural of next steps by a forefront accelerator laboratory to advance the interests of the high-energy physics community.From the moment the United States National Laboratory system was established, it was clear that the two laboratories focusing on elementary-particle physicsBrookhaven and Berkeley -had to build ever larger accelerators to stay vital. This

The National Synchrotron Light Source, Part I: Bright Idea

“…One reason was that the attention of the laboratory's high-energy and (with the exception of Chasman, Green, and Blewett) accelerator physicists -the single most influential group of scientists in the lab -was caught up in ISABELLE, then in its early planning stages. 24 A second was that the solid-state scientists had little experience putting together a proposal for a big facility, which took them into unfamiliar areas, such as large-scale construction and political promotion. And a third was the growing budget problem, including the fallout from the Mansfield Amendment, which though operative only for a year, forced the Department of Defense (DOD) to cease supporting many long-term projects and facilities -including Tantalus -which then had to appeal to the NSF for help, straining that agency's budget.…”

Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and Scientific Risks

“…It was called the Colliding Beam Accelerator (CBA) or ISABELLE, but was canceled in 1983 for a variety of scientific, technical, and financial reasons. 11 The underground circular tunnel to house the accelerator, however, had already been dug by that time,* so the nuclear-physics community recognized that an opportunity now existed to build RHIC inside the vacant tunnel with the goal of colliding nuclei as massive as gold at energies up to 100 GeV per nucleon per beam. Theorists estimated that this should be sufficient to create quark-gluon plasma with an energy density of about one hundred times that of ordinary nuclear mat- Just before RHIC was scheduled to get its first beam, an article by Madhursee Mukerjee entitled "A Little Big Bang" appeared in Scientific American in March 1999.…”

“…In the late 1970s and early 1980s the U.S. physics community made plans to construct a machine at BNL to collide counter-rotating beams of protons at energies of 200 GeV per proton in the center-of-momentum frame. It was called the Colliding Beam Accelerator (CBA) or ISABELLE, but was canceled in 1983 for a variety of scientific, technical, and financial reasons [11]. The underground circular tunnel to house the accelerator, however, had already been dug by that time, 8 so the nuclear-physics community recognized that an opportunity now existed to build RHIC inside the vacant tunnel with the goal of colliding nuclei as massive as gold at energies up to 100 GeV per nucleon per beam.…”

Modern and Future Colliders

“…In 1983, the construction of the 400 GeV c.m.e. ISABELLE pp collider (briefly renamed CBA) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the USA was stopped [47][48][49], and in the early 1990s two other flagship projects were terminated: the 6 TeV c.m.e. proton-proton complex UNK [50,51] in Protvino, Russia, and the 40 TeV c.m.e.…”