Question: what is a particle eccelerator

Matt Maddock answered on 15 Mar 2012:

A particle accelerator is a machine that makes very tiny things – like atoms, protons, or electrons – move very fast. They come in all shapes and sizes. If you’ve seen on old TV or computer monitor from before they went all flat-screen, they have a particle accelerator inside them!

However, when you hear about one on the news, or here on I’m an Engineer, what they’re probably talking about is a huge machine built to do various kinds of science.

Where I work, Diamond Light Source, we have a 500m long ring of pipe that we send electrons around 200,000 times a second. We accelerate them so that they’re going at just a hair-under the speed of light and have as much energy as we can give them! Then, they give off a type of light, called synchrotron radiation – which is very bright and good for looking at very tiny things in great detail – atoms, or proteins, or viruses, or the individual magnets in computer memory…

Perhaps you’ve heard of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider? That’s a particle accelerator too, but they accelerate protons in opposite directions and, when they’re going fast enough, they smash them together like a massive car-wreck! Then you can watch the bits of debris that fly out and use that information to work out some really clever stuff – like how gravity works, or what the universe was like just after the Big Bang, when it would have fitted inside a shoe-box!

So really, a particle accelerator does exactly what it sounds like, it makes particles go very fast – but what you so with them then is up to you!