Performance of the PEP-II B-Factory Collider at SLAC
PEP-II is an e+e-asymmetric B-Factory Collider located at SLAC operating at the Upsilon 4S resonance (3.1 GeV x 9 GeV). It has reached a luminosity of 9.21×1033/cm2/s and has delivered an integrated luminosity of 710 pb-1in one day. PEP-II has delivered, over the past six years, an integrated luminosity to the BaBar detector of over 262 fb-1. PEP-II operates in continuous injection mode for both beams boosting the integrated luminosity. The peak positron current has reached 2.45 A in 1588 bunches. Steady progress is being made in reaching higher luminosity. The goal over the next several years is to reach a luminosity of 2.1x1034/cm2/s. The accelerator physics issues being addressed in PEP-II to reach this goal include the electron cloud instability, beam-beam effects, parasitic beam-beam effects, high RF beam loading, shorter bunches, loweryinteraction region operation, and coupling control. Figure 1 shows the PEP-II tunnel.
The development of modern particle accelerators at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
The development of high-energy accelerators at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center has closely paralleled the advances in high-energy physics over the last fifty years. From its original conception as the world's largest linear accelerator for fixed target experiments, the facility evolved over the years with various colliding beam configurations in the quest for higher collision energies. An offshoot of the high-energy physics program was the synchrotron radiation from accelerators that proved a useful tool for x-ray studies. Photon science has since become the major thrust of the laboratory with the construction of LCLS, the world's first free electron x-ray laser.
Pedagogy of the “Not”: Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes
Postdigital capitalist time is an incessant acceleration that acts to homogenize time and wed us to the present, to which we have to constantly catch up. While the impulse of this is no doubt economic (the realization of value), it is crucially undergirded by a pedagogical logic wherein we have to perpetually learn and re-learn the latest apps, social media configurations, operating systems, and so on. Political strategies of resistance thus need to be bolstered by an alternative mode of educational life, and I propose a pedagogy of the “not” as one possibility. Such a pedagogy is an act of suspension that sustains a detachment from the present, clearing out oppositions and thereby exposing us to a radical indeterminacy and potentiality that is always untimely. Suspension is the praxis of negation, which means that negation operates by keeping sense indeterminate to meaning and signification. Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated. While this would appear as a form of exopedagogy, which withdraws from the dialectic of the private/public, I instead argue that it redefines the terms of any dialectic, redefining the very categories exopedagogy withdraws from. Before concluding, I spend some time with Sandy Grande’s important critiques of Eurocentrism and progress in Western critical education, demonstrating how negation as suspension circumvents these errors through its accommodation of—or, better, insistence on—variegated temporalities and forms of life.