Meson factories

MESON FACTORIES, which will produce beams of nucleons and mesons thousands of times more intense than those presently available, can be expected to take us to our next level of understanding of nuclear structure and to reveal processes and mechanisms presently hidden from view. By meson factory I mean a complete nuclear‐physics installation based on an accelerator of 500–1000 MeV, which is capable of providing at least 100 microamperes of high quality external beam. All ancillary facilities for performing high precision experiments with the primary and secondary beams are included: targeting, beam transport, data‐handling equipment and beam dumps for the residual beams. Although the energy regime is not novel, the intensity capability is, being about ten thousand times as great as existing synchrocyclotrons; a 1‐microampere, 800‐MeV accelerator is capable of generating pion fluxes in excess of ${10}^{10}\hspace{0.17em}\mathrm{particles}/{\mathrm{cm}}^2/\sec$ in a 6% momentum interval.