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 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gets a breath of fresh air as it collides beams of protons and oxygen ions for the very first time. Oxygen–oxygen and neon–neon collisions are also on the menu of the next few days.
General Physics
Jul 1, 2025
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The Higgs boson is the most intriguing and unusual object yet discovered by fundamental science. There is no higher experimental priority for particle physics than building an electron–positron collider to produce it copiously ...
General Physics
Jun 12, 2025
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New data from particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an "atom smasher" at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, reveals how the primordial soup generated in the ...
General Physics
Jun 11, 2025
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The LHCb experiment has taken a leap in precision physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In a new paper submitted to Physical Review Letters and currently available on the arXiv preprint server, the LHCb collaboration ...
General Physics
Jun 6, 2025
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As federal funding cuts impact decades of research, scientists could turn to black holes for cheaper, natural alternatives to expensive facilities searching for dark matter and similarly elusive particles that hold clues ...
Astronomy
Jun 3, 2025
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The Higgs boson, discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012, plays a central role in the Standard Model of particle physics, endowing elementary particles such as quarks with mass through its interactions. The ...
General Physics
May 19, 2025
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Analyzing massive datasets from nuclear physics experiments can take hours or days to process, but researchers are working to radically reduce that time to mere seconds using special software being developed at the Department ...
Optics & Photonics
May 19, 2025
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Laser ion acceleration uses intense laser flashes to heat electrons of a solid to enormous temperatures and propel these charged particles to extreme speeds. These have recently gained traction for applications in selectively ...
General Physics
May 19, 2025
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At CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), lead atom nuclei, accelerated in opposite directions, collide at speeds close to the speed of light. In such scattering processes, the quarks and gluons that make up these nuclei collide, ...
General Physics
May 16, 2025
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One of the things that makes the main particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility unique is that it was the first linear accelerator to deliver a continuous stream ...
General Physics
May 14, 2025
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