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 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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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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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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It's a paper that's been more than four decades in the making. Published in Physical Review Accelerators and Beams, a study has re-benchmarked the main particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson ...
General Physics
Nov 26, 2024
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A particle accelerator on display in a museum exhibition is rare. But a functioning particle accelerator conducting real scientific research in a museum exhibition? That's unprecedented.
General Physics
Nov 25, 2024
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Banks of computer screens stacked two and three high line the walls. The screens are covered with numbers and graphs that are unintelligible to an untrained eye. But they tell a story to the operators staffing the particle ...
General Physics
Nov 18, 2024
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At a talk held at CERN this week, the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported observing top quarks in collisions between lead ions, marking the first observation of this process in interactions between ...
General Physics
Nov 15, 2024
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142
In the quest to uncover the fundamental particles and forces of nature, one of the critical challenges facing high-energy experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is ensuring the quality of the vast amounts of data ...
General Physics
Nov 13, 2024
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126
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is like an immensely powerful kitchen, designed to cook up some of the rarest and hottest recipes in the universe, like the quark–gluon plasma, a state of matter known to have existed shortly ...
General Physics
Nov 11, 2024
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119
Since the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, there has been ongoing research there into Higgs bosons and a search for traces of physics beyond the existing model of elementary particles. Scientists working at the ATLAS ...
General Physics
Nov 7, 2024
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