Particle accelerator

A machine that uses electromagnetic fields to accelerate charged particles and guide them as beams or into collisions. Accelerators probe matter, produce radiation, and support applications in medicine and industry.

Electric field: A physical field that exerts force on electrically charged particles. Accelerators use electric fields to increase particle energy.
Large Hadron Collider: A circular collider at CERN that accelerates protons and heavy ions to high energies. It uses colliding proton beams to study fundamental particles.
Ernest Lawrence: An American physicist who developed the cyclotron and shared the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics. His cyclotron established a practical route to repeatedly accelerate particles in a compact machine.
Collider: An accelerator facility that brings two particle beams into collision to study their interactions. A collider directs accelerated beams at one another rather than primarily at a stationary target.
Particle physics: The study of fundamental particles and the forces governing their interactions. High-energy accelerators make collisions that reveal particles and test their interactions.
Magnetic field: A field produced by electric currents and magnetic materials that acts on moving charges and magnetic dipoles. Magnetic fields bend and focus particle beams without directly increasing their energy.
Synchrotron light source: A facility that uses electron storage rings to produce intense, tunable radiation for scientific experiments. Accelerated electrons emit bright radiation used to study materials and biological structures.
Rolf Widerøe: A Norwegian engineer and physicist whose work demonstrated resonant acceleration of particles using alternating electric fields. His early accelerator experiments supplied principles later used in radio-frequency machines.
Fixed-target experiment: An experiment in which an accelerated particle beam strikes a stationary target. Unlike a collider, this setup directs the beam onto matter at rest.
Nuclear physics: The study of atomic nuclei, their constituents, and the forces and reactions involving them. Accelerator beams enabled controlled experiments on nuclear structure and reactions.

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