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.
A team of physicists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, in Menlo Park, California, generated the highest-current, highest-peak-power electron beams ever produced. The team has published their paper in Physical Review ...
What do rope winding and giant pasta shapes have to do with particle physics? The answer is a new superconducting magnet prototype under development at CERN, lovingly named Fusillo because of its shape.
General Physics
Feb 24, 2025
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As the carriers of the weak force, the W and Z bosons are central to the Standard Model of particle physics. Though discovered four decades ago, the W and Z bosons continue to provide physicists with new avenues for exploration.
General Physics
Feb 19, 2025
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Researchers have announced results from a new search at the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (European XFEL) Facility at Hamburg for a hypothetical particle that may make up the dark matter of the universe. The experiment ...
Optics & Photonics
Feb 18, 2025
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Particle detectors play a crucial role in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. They allow scientists to study the behavior and properties of the particles produced in high-energy collisions. ...
Nanophysics
Feb 11, 2025
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Scientists have developed a method for generating fast, bright proton beams using a high-repetition-rate laser-plasma accelerator. This work, published in Nature Communications, resolves several long-standing challenges and ...
Optics & Photonics
Feb 11, 2025
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In order to find rare processes from collider data, scientists use computer algorithms to determine the type and properties of particles based on the faint signals that they leave in the detector. One such particle is the ...
General Physics
Feb 3, 2025
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In the first study of its kind at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the CMS collaboration has tested whether top quarks adhere to Einstein's special theory of relativity. The research is published in the journal Physics Letters ...
General Physics
Jan 23, 2025
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) made its groundbreaking discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, but its ancestry can be traced back more than 60 years to the first electron-positron collision experiment in Italy. Named Anello ...
General Physics
Jan 16, 2025
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The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has released a new high-precision measurement of the lifetime of the electrically neutral beauty (B0) meson—a hadron composed of a bottom antiquark and a down quark.
General Physics
Dec 19, 2024
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