Particle accelerators are experimental techniques and associated infrastructures that use electromagnetic fields to accelerate charged particles, such as electrons, protons, or heavy ions, to high kinetic energies and control their trajectories for collision, beam-target, or irradiation experiments. They employ radiofrequency cavities, electrostatic fields, and magnetic optics (dipole, quadrupole, and higher-order magnets) to shape, focus, and steer beams with precise energy, emittance, and luminosity characteristics. As techniques, accelerators enable probing of fundamental interactions in high-energy physics, production of secondary particles (e.g., neutrons, mesons, synchrotron radiation), and finely controlled irradiation or imaging in materials science, nuclear physics, and medical and industrial applications.
The U.S. nuclear physics community is preparing to build the electron–ion collider (EIC), a flagship facility for probing the properties of matter and the strong nuclear force that holds matter together. The EIC will allow ...
General Physics
Apr 23, 2024
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With every new particle accelerator built for research, scientists have an opportunity to push the limits of discovery. But this is only true if new particle accelerators deliver the desired performance—no small feat in ...
General Physics
Apr 18, 2024
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Many advances in structural science since the 1970s were made by probing materials with synchrotron radiation: that is, high energy X-rays generated through accelerating high-energy electrons. The latest generation of such ...
General Physics
Apr 12, 2024
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The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) require high-performance event-selection systems—known as "triggers" in particle physics—to filter the flow of data to manageable levels. The triggers pick events with ...
General Physics
Apr 11, 2024
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Last week, at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference, the CMS collaboration presented a measurement of the effective leptonic electroweak mixing angle. The result is the most precise measurement performed at a hadron ...
General Physics
Apr 8, 2024
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Operating at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since 2022, the FASER experiment is designed to search for extremely weakly interacting particles. Such particles are predicted by many theories beyond the Standard Model that ...
General Physics
Apr 8, 2024
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In March 2024, the CMS collaboration announced the observation of two photons creating two tau leptons in proton–proton collisions. It is the first time that this process has been seen in proton–proton collisions, which ...
General Physics
Mar 26, 2024
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Whether in listening to music or pushing a swing in the playground, we are all familiar with resonances and how they amplify an effect—a sound or a movement, for example. However, in high-intensity circular particle accelerators, ...
General Physics
Mar 20, 2024
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In massive particle accelerators, sub-atomic particles (like electrons) are sped up to super-high speeds comparable to the speed of light towards a target surface. The collision of accelerated sub-atomic particles gives rise ...
Optics & Photonics
Mar 13, 2024
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The particle accelerators that enable high-energy physics and serve many fields of science, such as materials, medical, and fusion research, are driven by superconducting magnets that are, to put it simply, quite finicky.
General Physics
Mar 11, 2024
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