NSF adds four to excellence list

Pipe in a tunnel Findings for design stage

works below —4° C , Dr. Zettlemoyer explains.

Silica nucleating agents produced at the Bethlehem, Pa., campus have undergone field tests under the di­rection of Dr. Roscoe R. Braham of the University of Chicago's cloud physics department. At the testing temperature, —9° C , the silica-modi­fied substrates promote ice formation, Dr. Braham confirms. But their larger size makes the silica particles less useful than the 80-A. to 100-A. silver iodide crystals below —4° C , he points out.

The work at Lehigh provides an insight into the nature of the nucle­ating process. Steric hindrance stud­ies made with isopropyl alcohol show that optimum cloud seeding conditions exist when the nucleating sites exist in patches, or clusters, rather than as single sites, evenly spaced. The best conditions prevail when there is an average of two sites per patch, Dr. Zettlemoyer says.

Accelerator fires 10 b.e.v. beam The first test of the 2-mile-long 20-b.e.v. linear accelerator built by Stanford University was highly suc­cessful. The $114 million atom smasher at the Stanford Linear Accel­erator Center (SLAC) near Menlo Park, Calif., produced a 10-b.e.v. electron beam.

The accelerator's performance was "better than we had any right to ex­pect," according to Prof. Wolfgang Κ. Η. Panofsky, SLAC director. SLAC had expected that another year would be needed for readjustments and tuneup; now it expects that re­search operations will begin within six months.

The event climaxed 10 years of study, design work, and construction begun by Stanford scientists in 1956,

including the use of a 1000-foot steel pipe in an abandoned railroad tunnel for findings which were then used dur­ing the design stage. The project was authorized by Congress in 1961, and construction was begun the following year.

Ten experiments have already been approved for the first year of research with the accelerator, Prof. Panofsky says. These experiments, which in­volve a search for new particles and various studies of nucléon structure, were proposed by research teams from Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, and University of Cali­fornia, Berkeley. Built under Atomic Energy Commission contract, SLAC is a national research facility and will be open to use by scientists from all parts of the U.S. and the world.

Although it is too early to schedule experiments precisely, SLAC has adopted some operating guidelines says Dr. Matthew Sands, SLAC dep­uty director. The accelerator will not be operated at full power until SLAC gains some experience with the per­formance and reliability of accelerator components.

Between now and the time of full research capability, much work re­mains to be done. Installation of magnets and other components to di­rect the beam to the research areas is under way. Analytical devices for performing experiments in the research areas are being built.

The world's largest linear accelera­tor, the SLAC machine will produce beams with energies to 20 b.e.v. and currents to 30 microamperes. This is nearly 20 times the energy and 30 times the current of the largest exist­ing linear accelerator in the U.S., Stanford's Mark III. The SLAC ac­celerator will produce 10 times the energy of a low-current linear accel­erator recently built in the U.S.S.R.

The National Science Foundation last week awarded four new educational centers of excellence grants and one supplementary grant totaling almost $16.5 million. The new recipients are North Carolina State University; Pur­due University; Rutgers, the State University; and Tulane University. In addition, the University of Roch­ester received the first supplementary grant given a center of excellence grantee.

This brings to 17 the number of uni­versities taking part in NSF's science development program. Previous sci­ence development grants in excess of $47 million went last year to 13 uni­versities (C&EN, April 18, page 64). The first four institutions were an­nounced by President Johnson in May 1965.

The Rve grants given last week are marked chiefly for biology and mathe­matics. In contrast to the 1965 series, chemistry and chemical engineering are minor participants in this round. The sole direct benefit to chemistry will be a tandem Van de Graaff accel­erator installed in an underground fa­cility at Purdue. The accelerator will be used by the chemistry and physics departments. At North Carolina State, the chemical engineering de­partment will use part of $306,000 as­signed for engineering.

Under the centers of excellence pro­gram, NSF awards grants to a limited number of universities each year. The goal is to help already capable science and engineering departments develop into front-rank centers of distinction.

Initial grants cover a three-year pe­riod, during which the universities in­vest in new staff, equipment, build­ings, curriculums, and student-assist­ance programs. In addition, institu­tions such as the University of Vir­ginia, Western Reserve University, and the University of Southern California are using the grants to establish inter­disciplinary centers.

After the first three years, two sup­plementary grants can extend the total grant period to five years. However, NSF expects the universities to be self-supporting at the end of this time. Therefore, the universities gradually take over funding for innovations started with NSF money. Even at the beginning of some grant projects-such as the new chemistry building at Rochester—the university itself con­tributes much of the funds.

Origin of the science development program was the Seaborg Report by the President's Science Advisory Com­mittee in 1960. The report described the need in the U.S. for additional high-quality graduate education cen­ters.

MAY 30, 1966 C&EN 25