Los Alamos National Laboratory in the context of "W88"

The Pajarito Plateau is a volcanic plateau in north central New Mexico, United States. The plateau, part of the Jemez Mountains, is bounded on the west by the Sierra de los Valles, the range forming the east rim of the Valles Caldera, and on the east by the Puye escarpment, which rises about 300 to 400 feet (90 to 100 m) above the Rio Grande valley about a mile (1.6 km) west of the river. The Rio Grande passes through White Rock Canyon to the southeast, and the Caja del Rio (Cerros del Rio) across the river is sometimes regarded as part of the plateau. The plateau is occupied by several notable entities, including Bandelier National Monument, the town of Los Alamos and its remote suburb White Rock, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Elevations range from about 5,600 feet (1,700 meters) at the river to about 7,800 feet (2,400 meters) where the plateau merges into the mountain range.

The Pajarito Plateau is primarily composed of Bandelier Tuff, a voluminous deposit of volcanic tuff laid down in an explosive eruption — in this case, a pair of eruptions from the nearby Valles Caldera. The two ignimbrite-forming eruptions occurred about 1.6 million and 1.2 million years ago and ejected about 300 cubic kilometers of rock each. The orange-pink rock formations constituting the resulting ignimbrites are known as the Otowi and Tshirege Members of the Bandelier tuff. The tuff lies on top of a volcanic field, exposed to the east, which used to be continuous with the Caja del Rio (now across the Rio Grande).

George Zweig (/zwaɪɡ/; born May 30, 1937) is an American physicist of Russian-Jewish origin. He was trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman. He introduced, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, the quark model (although he named it "aces"). He later turned his attention to neurobiology. He has worked as a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the financial services industry.

Los Alamos (Spanish: Los Álamos, meaning The Poplars) is a census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, that is recognized as one of the development and creation places of the atomic bomb—the primary objective of the Manhattan Project by Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II. The town is on four mesas of the Pajarito Plateau, and had a population of about 13,200 as of 2020. It is the county seat and one of two population centers in Los Alamos County; the other is White Rock.

White Rock is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Los Alamos County, New Mexico. It is one of two major population centers in the county; the other is Los Alamos (the county seat). The population was 5,725 at the 2010 census. It is largely a bedroom community for employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory and their families. Access to White Rock from the town of Los Alamos and other cities and towns in New Mexico is via New Mexico State Road 4, which forms the northwestern boundary of the community. Administratively, White Rock is a neighborhood of Los Alamos; locals refer to Los Alamos (meaning not White Rock) as "the Townsite," or "the Hill". In 2024, White Rock was named "Happiest Small Town in America".

Herbert Lawrence Anderson (May 24, 1914 – July 16, 1988) was an American nuclear physicist who was Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago.

He contributed to the Manhattan Project. He was also a member of the team which made the first demonstration of nuclear fission in the United States, in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University. He participated in the first atomic bomb test, codenamed Trinity. After the close of World War II, he was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1982. There, he helped Fermi establish the Enrico Fermi Institute and was its director from 1958 to 1962. The latter part of his career was as a senior fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award.