Accelerators and storage rings are coupled physical systems designed to generate, manipulate, and store high-energy charged particle beams under precisely controlled electromagnetic fields. Accelerators, such as linear accelerators or synchrotrons, use radiofrequency cavities and magnet lattices (dipoles, quadrupoles, higher multipoles) to incrementally increase beam energy and control transverse and longitudinal dynamics. Storage rings maintain beams on closed orbits for extended durations, employing sophisticated lattice designs, beam optics, and feedback systems to preserve emittance, energy spread, and stability while enabling collisions or extraction for experiments, synchrotron radiation production, or secondary beam generation.
Keeping high-power particle accelerators at peak performance requires advanced and precise control systems. For example, the primary research machine at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator ...
General Physics
Feb 13, 2026
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Just after 9 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, final beams of oxygen ions—oxygen atoms stripped of their electrons—circulated through the twin 2.4-mile-circumference rings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and crashed ...
General Physics
Feb 9, 2026
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A novel apparatus at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has made extremely precise measurements of unstable ruthenium nuclei. The measurements are a significant milestone in nuclear physics ...
General Physics
Jan 30, 2026
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A team of engineers and scientists has shown for the first time that a hard-X-ray cavity can provide net X-ray gain, with X-ray pulses being circulated between crystal mirrors and amplified in the process, much like happens ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 28, 2026
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Mark Thomson, the new head of Europe's physics laboratory CERN, voiced confidence Tuesday about raising the billions of dollars needed to build by far the world's biggest particle accelerator.
General Physics
Jan 28, 2026
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Together with an international team, researchers from the Molecular Physics Department at the Fritz Haber Institute have revealed how atoms rearrange themselves before releasing low-energy electrons in a decay process initiated ...
General Physics
Jan 26, 2026
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Scientists analyzing data from heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world's most powerful particle collider, located at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research—have new evidence that a ...
General Physics
Jan 22, 2026
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Researchers have reported new experimental results addressing the origin of rare proton-rich isotopes heavier than iron, called p-nuclei. Led by Artemis Tsantiri, then-graduate student at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams ...
General Physics
Jan 22, 2026
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A research team at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) is the first ever to observe a beta-delayed neutron emission from fluorine-25, a rare, unstable nuclide. Using the FRIB Decay Station Initiator (FDSi), the team ...
General Physics
Dec 20, 2025
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Behind every particle collision generated at the Large Hadron Collider is a multitude of technical feats. One of these is refrigeration on an industrial scale. To guide the particles, the thousands of superconducting magnets ...
General Physics
Dec 19, 2025
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