Particle accelerator facts for kids
A particle accelerator, also called an atom smasher, is a machine that accelerates (speeds up) particles and makes them travel at very high speeds. Accelerators work by pushing particles like electrons, protons, or atomic nuclei (the centers of atoms) with electric fields and by steering them with magnetic fields. Their main use is to study particle physics.
The largest accelerators are used to study particles smaller than atoms; smaller accelerators are used to study atomic nuclei and make radioactive materials. There are two kinds of particle accelerators: linear accelerators and circular accelerators. Linear accelerators move the particles in a line, while circular accelerators move the particles in a circle. One example of a particle accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It is very big, stretching through two countries. Another example is the Tevatron in the United States. An example of a particle accelerator used in everyday life is the cathode ray tube, used in older televisions and computer monitors.
When accelerated particles hit other particles such as atoms, smaller pieces come out. This helps people see particles smaller than an atom. Normally those particles cannot be seen, but they can in the particle accelerator. This is because in some ways energy and matter are the same thing. At the high speed created in these machines, some of the movement energy is changed into matter. It is the opposite process that nuclear weapons use; nuclear weapons turn matter into energy. Small amounts of antimatter are also created during the process.
The particle accelerator at CERN was set up to search for the Higgs Boson particle, which would complete the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
Particle accelerators often use very advanced technology. This makes them cost a lot of money which is usually paid by governments.
Images for kids
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The Tevatron (background circle), a synchrotron collider type particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Batavia, Illinois, USA. Shut down in 2011, until 2007 it was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, accelerating protons to an energy of over 1 TeV (tera electron volts). Beams of protons and antiprotons, circulating in opposite directions in the single vacuum chamber of the ring, collided at two magnetically induced intersection points.
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Animation showing the operation of a linear accelerator, widely used in both physics research and cancer treatment.
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Building covering the 2 mile (3.2 km) beam tube of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) at Menlo Park, California, the second most powerful linac in the world.
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A Cockcroft-Walton generator (Philips, 1937), residing in Science Museum (London).
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A 1960s single stage 2 MeV linear Van de Graaff accelerator, here opened for maintenance
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Modern superconducting radio frequency, multicell linear accelerator component.
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Lawrence's 60 inch cyclotron, with magnet poles 60 inches (5 feet, 1.5 meters) in diameter, at the University of California Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley, in August, 1939, the most powerful accelerator in the world at the time. Glenn T. Seaborg and Edwin McMillan (right) used it to discover plutonium, neptunium and many other transuranic elements and isotopes, for which they received the 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
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A magnet in the synchrocyclotron at the Orsay proton therapy center
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Segment of an electron synchrotron at DESY
See also
In Spanish: Acelerador de partículas para niños
