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.
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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40
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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87
Queen Mary University of London physicist Professor Chris White, along with his twin brother Professor Martin White from the University of Adelaide, have discovered a surprising connection between the Large Hadron Collider ...
Quantum Physics
Dec 19, 2024
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180
In the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But fast forward 13.8 billion years to the present day, and the universe is made almost entirely of matter, so something must have happened ...
General Physics
Dec 16, 2024
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68
Scientists have used a pair of lasers and a supersonic sheet of gas to accelerate electrons to high energies in less than a foot. The development marks a major step forward in laser-plasma acceleration, a promising method ...
Plasma Physics
Dec 11, 2024
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68
At Brookhaven National Laboratory's (BNL's) Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), billions of gold ions race through magnets at nearly the speed of light. Thousands of times per second, they collide head-on, breaking into ...
General Physics
Dec 11, 2024
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69
Collisions between heavy ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) create quark–gluon plasma, a hot and dense state of matter that is thought to have filled the universe around one millionth of a second after the Big Bang. ...
General Physics
Dec 9, 2024
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