Particle Accelerators BY OLIVIA DANNER
One of the fundamental questions of physics, and science in general, boils down to understanding the nature of the universe in its entirety. One facet of answering this question is studying the origins of the universe, back when everything was high-energy atomic soup full of particles colliding to make different, bigger particles. The key to being able to study this was the particle accelerator, which first allowed us to finally understand the structure of the atom, and later to create new particles. As a straightforward first definition, particle accelerators are exactly what their name implies: “electrical devices that accelerate charged atomic or subatomic particles to high energies” (1). There are
two ways to classify particle accelerators: by structure – linear accelerators (commonly known as linacs) or circular accelerators – or the method of acceleration – electrostatic or electrodynamic (2). Electrostatic means that unchanging electric fields are used to accelerate particles, while electrodynamic refers to the use of electromagnetic fields of changing direction and flux. The former are much easier to generate, so this was the method used for early accelerators (3). The very early x-ray machine is considered the first particle accelerator: an evacuated glass tube with a negatively charged cathode at one end and a positively charged anode at the other (4). Heating up the cathode excites the electrons in the metal enough for
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