As the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory completes its 40th anniversary year, particle physicists at Cornell are looking forward to a very busy 2008.

They will play major roles in three new "big science" machines -- the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) and the International Linear Collider (ILC) -- that could answer the most fundamental questions about how the universe formed, not to mention what makes up the whopping 95 percent of it that remains unaccounted for.

But if Cornell has established a tradition of leadership in accelerator physics, said Maury Tigner, the Hans A. Bethe Professor Emeritus of Physics and director of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based Sciences and Education, it's a tradition built on decades of work and discoveries with Cornell's synchrotron, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), and its predecessors.

Tigner, who helped design the synchrotron in 1967 with Cornell physicists Robert Wilson, Raphael Littauer, Albert Silverman, Karl Berkelman and others has been among the many who over four decades have used it to discover and study the tiniest elements of matter and the forces that act upon them.

Cornell's leadership in accelerator physics traces back decades to the 1920s and '30s and a series of cyclotrons (accelerators that propel particles around an ever-widening spiral with a constant magnetic field).

The synchrotron, which propels particles to much higher energies through a narrow vacuum tube surrounded by smaller magnets, was invented during World War II. At Cornell, the first synchrotron was built in the late 1940s in the basement of Newman Lab -- and led to advances including the investigations of synchrotron radiation by physics professors Diran Tomboulian, Paul Hartman and Dale Corson (now president emeritus) in 1952.

The ensuing years brought a series of upgrades that worked at ever higher energies -- beginning at 300 million electron volts (an electron volt is the energy an electron gains when accelerated by one volt); then increasing to 1.3 billion electron volts (1.3 GeV); then 2.2 GeV.

"That was the era of exploding new knowledge about elementary particles," Tigner said. "New particles were being discovered, it seemed, almost every week."

Today's synchrotron is part of a chain of accelerators that operates at billions of electron volts and uses colliding beams -- a 1978 development that smashes opposing beams of particles into each other instead of a single beam into a fixed target. The facility, which receives major funding from the National Science Foundation and other sources, now includes CESR, the CLEO detector and the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), which uses the high-intensity X-rays generated by the synchrotron to investigate the structure and dynamics of materials from a wide range of fields.

Among the results: In the 1990s, one in every seven papers in Physical Review D, the world's leading journal of particle physics, reported work done at Wilson Lab. At CHESS, scientists have discovered details about protein structure, uncovered ancient writing on archaeological samples, and studied the action of fuel-injected engines.

Accelerator physics at Cornell has been a group effort from the beginning, leading to a spirit of collaboration unique among university physics departments, said Tigner. And the tone was set by the late Hans Bethe.

"Bethe had the knack of conveying his excitement and his way of going about things to other people. And he gathered around him people who were capable of doing the same thing," said Tigner, who also credits Cornell administrators over the years for their support. "They have understood it, honored it, and have cultivated it and given us the freedom to continue cultivating it."

As a result, he said, Cornell scientists have been on the leading edge of research for decades -- and will remain there.

Currently, Cornell physicists are preparing experiments for the LHC, scheduled to begin operation in 2008 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. They're also preparing designs for the ILC and for the ERL, a next-generation accelerator based on a concept Tigner proposed in 1965 that would create one of the brightest, most focused X-ray beams in the world. These facilities could lead to new discoveries in fields from biology to chemistry to materials science.

The research is still advancing, said Tigner; and the sense of enthusiasm and camaraderie -- present when the synchrotron was built in 1967 -- hasn't changed.

"The specialization of labor has gotten more specific now," he said. "But the spirit is still there."