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 world's first Nb3Sn superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) electron accelerator recently achieved stable beam acceleration, reaching a maximum energy of 4.6 MeV with an average macro-pulse beam current exceeding 100 mA.
General Physics
May 10, 2024
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Two detector upgrades of ALICE, the dedicated heavy-ion physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), have recently been approved for installation during the next long shutdown of the LHC, which will take place from ...
General Physics
Apr 30, 2024
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The late physicist Joseph Polchinski once said the existence of magnetic monopoles is "one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen." In its quest for these particles, which have a magnetic charge and ...
General Physics
Apr 26, 2024
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For over a decade, the CMS Collaboration, a large team of researchers based at different institutes worldwide, has been analyzing data collected at the Compact Muon Solenoid, a general-purpose particle detector at CERN's ...
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 a ...
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 distinguishing ...
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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