Picture Tour of 2015 SARA Western Conference

Stanford University, California
Julian Jove

The Stanford University campus is in Silicon Valley south of San Francisco. The satellite image below shows the northern portion of the campus from 4 km altitude. The Physics and Astrophysics building, where the 2015 SARA Western Conference was held, is just left of center, barely distinguishable at this altitude. Just out of view to the south is the huge open area populated with radio research facilities including the 150 ft diameter dish antenna that SARA Western Conference attendees toured in 2010 and 2012. The main campus is about 33 square kilometers (8 180 acres). Imagine paying California property taxes on that each year.

Our tour guide for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) facility was Dr. Mandeep S. S. Gill, Observational Extragalactic Cosmologist at KIPAC. On the next page is an aerial view of the accelerator, unmistakable by the long, straight structure about 3 km long. The accelerator has 240 high-power klystrons, all manufactured at the laboratory and dispersed along the length of the accelerator. When standing at one end of the tunnel, the other end is visible only as the parallax intersection of the far walls.

The old Collider Experimental Hall (CEH) is shown next from 500 m altitude. The CEH is mostly unused now, but it is where high-speed particles were smashed together to produce fundamental atomic particles. This is a huge industrial building with a concrete-lined pit that is 71 m long x 20 m wide (233 ft x 65 ft) and whose floor is about 17 m (55 ft) below the existing surface grade. Many large components and equipment, such as instrumentation and computers, still exist in the structure. The heavy equipment on the facility’s floor is serviced by 25 and 110 ton overhead cranes. The source of the three aerial images is Google Earth.

KIPAC Facility and Accelerator Tour