Accelerators & storage rings

Facilities use electric fields to accelerate charged particles and magnetic fields to guide them. Storage rings circulate particles repeatedly in closed paths for experiments, radiation production, or collisions.

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Linear particle accelerator: A particle accelerator that sends particles along a straight path through successive accelerating structures. Unlike a ring, it accelerates particles without repeatedly circulating them.
Large Hadron Collider: A CERN accelerator and collider that brings proton or heavy-ion beams into collision in a 27-kilometer underground ring. It exemplifies a storage ring built to collide high-energy particle beams.
Charged particle: A particle with a nonzero electric charge, which responds to electric and magnetic fields. Accelerators act on charged particles because fields can transfer energy and change their paths.
Fixed-target experiment: An experiment in which an accelerated particle beam strikes a stationary target. A fixed target uses one beam and a target instead of colliding two stored beams.
CERN: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, an intergovernmental laboratory that operates major particle-physics facilities. Its accelerator complex links many stages of research and supplies beams to experiments.
Cyclotron: A circular accelerator that uses a constant magnetic field and an alternating electric field to accelerate particles outward in a spiral. It is a compact circular design whose orbit expands as particles gain energy.
Synchrotron radiation: Electromagnetic radiation emitted by charged particles when their motion is accelerated, especially as they bend in magnetic fields. Bending stored electrons produces bright radiation used for research.
Lorentz force: The force on a charged particle due to electric and magnetic fields, determined by its charge and velocity. It governs how fields accelerate and steer particles inside a machine.
Collider: A machine that brings two particle beams into collision to study their interactions. Storage rings are one way to build colliders, alongside other accelerator layouts.
World Wide Web: A system of interlinked documents and resources accessed over the internet, proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Berners-Lee created it at CERN to help researchers share information.