A farewell to the x-ray –generating particle accelerator that was my father’s baby

Last week technicians at Argonne National Laboratory began to disassemble a particle accelerator known as the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a ring 1.1 kilometers around that since 1995 has shone as one of the world’s brightest sources of x-rays. It’s hardly the end for the facility, which annually serves nearly 6000 scientists from myriad fields. Within a year, workers will replace the electron accelerator with a new one that will boost the intensity of the APS’s output x-ray beams by a factor of 500. A major scientific facility will be rejuvenated. That’s not unusual. For me personally, however, the dismantling of the original APS evokes strong emotions. My father, Yanglai Cho , was an accelerator physicist who spent his entire career at Argonne, a Department of Energy (DOE) laboratory outside of Chicago. Forty years ago, he led the small team that hammered out the conceptual design for the machine. In my mind, it was his baby. When dad died in 2015 at age 82—4 years after a devastating stroke—I took comfort in the thought that he lived on in that accelerator. Now, it, too, will be gone. I was a teenager when, in the early 1980s, my dad started musing about the accelerator. I loved him dearly, but, as many people do, I had a complicated relationship with my father. He could be tyrannical and demanding, self-centered and remote. “I don’t care what you do just as long as you’re the best at it,” he would pronounce to me or one...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news