Particle Accelerator

[justinater22]

How do Partice Accelerator's work? How do they speed the particles up so that it gets so close to the speed of light? Also what are particle accelerators used for?

[swansont]

You have an electric field that exerts a force on the charged particle and speeds it up. There's a lot in the details of how you do that, especially as you approach c, but that's the very basic concept behind them. By colliding particles at high energy you can test how physics works at those energies, which corresponds to a temperature, which would have been present at some short time after the big bang or is present in a star. You can also create particles and isotopes not found in nature and investigate them.

[Mike Smith Cosmos]

How do Partice Accelerator's work? How do they speed the particles up so that it gets so close to the speed of light? Also what are particle accelerators used for?

 

If you get a stone on the end of a piece of string/Rope say 2 -3 meters long and swing it around ( do not do this unless your nearest person is a long way from you say 20 meters ). as you go on you find the speed of angular movement increases quite dramatically. This is because the energy you input on the first rotation is added to the second rotation and onward ( apart from air friction ) would build up quite considerably.

 

Such is the principle of a particle accelerator. The energy is put in each rotation by electric fields (synchronized) . The particles are steered by magnetic fields, and resistance is minimized by reducing the air. The particles can thus reach very fast approaching the speed of light. ( not quite) If they do another in the opposite direction and then let /switch them to collide. All that energy can go to make new particles. ( eg The Large Hadron Collider )