This is the second in a series examining Cornell’s underground hot spots.

Last week’s electrical fire brought unexpected attention to the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory, making it quite literally an “underground hot spot”. The synchrotron itself, originally constructed in 1967, was the world’s largest electron synchrotron at its opening and was considered the largest single construction project at Cornell. But despite the prestige it held at its inception, Cornell students know little about its purpose or even its existence.

Buried nearly 40 feet beneath the track complex and extending to its east, west and south, the synchrotron is a giant ring that is almost one-half mile in circumference. The Wilson Lab that houses the facility is named for Robert R. Wilson, the physicist who served as director of the Cornell Laboratory of Nuclear Studies from 1947 to 1967. One of the many Cornell physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, Wilson came to Cornell in 1947 and was responsible for the design of Cornell’s particle accelerators. Wilson passed away in 2000 at age 85. Synchrotron: A section of retired equipment at the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory.

A synchrotron is a device that uses a magnetic field to accelerate particles (e.g. electrons) at faster and faster speeds by boosting their energies as they travel around the ring. Synchrotrons assist in the discovery and study of the smallest elements of matter and their interactions with each other.

Cornell’s synchrotron is part of a group of devices that includes a linear particle accelerator and the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, which was added in 1979 to allow the synchrotron to collide particles into each other. The radiation generated by the synchrotron is also harnessed and used for research in physics, chemistry, biology, materials science and environmental science. At Cornell, the synchrotron radiation facility is named the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source.

Cornell has been a leader in particle physics for decades and was declared “the atom-smashing center of the East” by The Cornell Daily Sun as early as 1936, when Cornell’s first particle accelerator was constructed —only the second of its kind in the United States.

In the late 1940s, a more advanced accelerator, the first Cornell synchrotron, was located in the basement of Newman Laboratory. This first synchrotron was capable of accelerating electrons to an energy of 300 million electron volts, compared to the approximately 10 billion electron volts of today’s iteration.

Perhaps last week’s electrical fire can serve as the spark that will bring attention back to Cornell’s synchrotron, an area that brought pride to Cornell since it was first installed in the late 1960s.