IEEE
The Tokaido Shinkansen, the world's first inter-city, high-speed railway system, began operations on its route of over 500 kilometers between Tokyo and Osaka more than thirty years ago, in 1964. After its establishment, the Tokaido Shinkansen made a major contribution to Japan's rapid post-war economic growth as the country's principal transportation artery. Today (1997), more than two hundred and eighty Shinkansen trains operate between Tokyo and Osaka each day, with eleven departures an hour at peak times, and a daily ridership of more than 360,000 passengers.
The basic research tool at SLAC is an intense beam of electrons that have been accelerated by an electric field equivalent to 30 billion volts, making this the most powerful electron beam in the world.
The two-mile linear accelerator produces this field using high-power microwaves traveling through an evacuated waveguide. Electrons injected into one end of this pipe are continuously accelerated by this traveling field to very high energies.