Question: What is a Synchrotron?

Ben Drumm answered on 24 Jun 2013:

A synchrotron is a circular particle accelerator, which in our case uses RF (Radio Frequency) power to accelerate protons and large magnets to steer and focus our proton beam.

You can get some really high speeds with a synchrotron, as protons are sent around the loop repeatedly – we accelerate protons to 84% if the speed of light by sending them round out synchrotron 10,000 times. Because we use the same loop (about 100m circumference) we can accelerate particles over a distance of about 1000km (100m x 10,000 loops) in a relatively small space.

To do the same in a linear accelerator (one which accelerates particles in a straight line) would require a much larger (and longer!) facility, which would be brazil nuts…