Principle for a Pi‐Pi Collision Device Proposed

“Precetron” is the name for a new kind of storage and collision device proposed recently by Bogdan Maglic of Rutgers University and Robert Macek of the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (reported in the new Gordon and Breach journal Particle Accelerators, April 1970). Unlike the usual storage rings, which provide particle interactions through colliding beams of relatively high intensity, the precetron is a device in which particles interact over their entire orbit; the orbits themselves are precessing—hence the name Maglic and Macek told us that the new device would produce observable collision rates—up to 1000 per hour—with unstable particles (whose lifetimes are as short as $10−8 sec$⁠), in addition to low‐intensity uncollimated stable‐particle systems.