A particle accelerator is a device that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to high speeds and to contain them in well-defined beams. An ordinary CRT television set is a simple form of accelerator. There are two basic types: electrostatic and oscillating field.
In the early 20th century, cyclotrons were commonly referred to as atom smashers.Despite the fact that modern colliders actually propel subatomic particles–atoms themselves now being relatively simple to disassemble without an accelerator–the term persists in popular usage when referring to particle accelerators in general
Beams of high-energy particles are useful for both fundamental and applied research in the sciences, and also in many technical and industrial fields unrelated to fundamental research. It has been estimated that there are approximately 26,000 accelerators worldwide. Of these, only ~1% are the research machines with energies above 1 GeV (that are the main focus of this article), ~44% are for radiotherapy, ~41% for ion implantation, ~9% for industrial processing and research, and ~4% for biomedical and other low-energy research.
For the most basic inquiries into the dynamics and structure of matter, space, and time, physicists seek the simplest kinds of interactions at the highest possible energies. These typically entail particle energies of many GeV, and the interactions of the simplest kinds of particles: leptons (e.g. electrons and positrons) and quarks for the matter, or photons and gluons for the field quanta. Since isolated quarks are experimentally unavailable due to color confinement, the simplest available experiments involve the interactions of, first, leptons with each other, and second, of leptons with nucleons, which are composed of quarks and gluons. To study the collisions of quarks with each other, scientists resort to collisions of nucleons, which at high energy may be usefully considered as essentially 2-body interactions of the quarks and gluons of which they are composed. Thus elementary particle physicists tend to use machines creating beams of electrons, positrons, protons, and anti-protons, interacting with each other or with the simplest nuclei (e.g., hydrogen or deuterium) at the highest possible energies, generally hundreds of GeV or more. Nuclear physicists and cosmologists may use beams of bare atomic nuclei, stripped of electrons, to investigate the structure, interactions, and properties of the nuclei themselves, and of condensed matter at extremely high temperatures and densities, such as might have occurred in the first moments of the Big Bang. These investigations often involve collisions of heavy nuclei – of atoms like iron or gold – at energies of several GeV per nucleon. At lower energies, beams of accelerated nuclei are also used in medicine, as for the treatment of cancer.
Besides being of fundamental interest, high energy electrons may be coaxed into emitting extremely bright and coherent beams of high energy photons – ultraviolet and X ray – via synchrotron radiation, which photons have numerous uses in the study of atomic structure, chemistry, condensed matter physics, biology, and technology. Examples include the ESRF in Europe, which has recently been used to extract detailed 3-dimensional images of insects trapped in amber.Thus there is a great demand for electron accelerators of moderate (GeV) energy and high intensity
Particle physics
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Particle physics
* Professor Mike Charlton gives an introduction to Particle Physics with Dr Tom Whyntie of CERN at the Cheltenham Science Festival
Introduction to Particle Physics
Particle physics