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.
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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Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.
General Physics
May 13, 2025
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In a paper published in Physical Review C, the ALICE collaboration reports measurements that quantify the transmutation of lead into gold in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
General Physics
May 8, 2025
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Technology is being pushed to its very limits. The upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN slated for the next few years will increase data transfer rates beyond what the current neutrino detector for the FASER ...
General Physics
May 8, 2025
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Neutrinos and antineutrinos are elementary particles with small but unknown mass. High-precision atomic mass measurements at the Accelerator Laboratory of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have revealed that beta decay ...
General Physics
May 6, 2025
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For the first time, a research team has successfully produced one of the most neutron-rich isotopes, hydrogen-6, in an electron scattering experiment.
General Physics
Apr 30, 2025
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To learn more about the nature of matter, energy, space, and time, physicists smash high-energy particles together in large accelerator machines, creating sprays of millions of particles per second of a variety of masses ...
Quantum Physics
Apr 24, 2025
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