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The image shows a table-top-sized electrical machine. It has a cubic base out of which comes a clear vertical tube about half-a-meter long. Inside the tube a conveyer belt is seen running up and down the tube. On top of the tube is a metallic sphere maybe thirty centimeters in diameter.
An artist’s rendition of a Van de Graaff generator.
The image shows a disc-shaped cyclotron consisting of two horizontal semicircular plates that are separated by a gap. An alternating voltage is put across the gap, and an electric field is shown going from the left semicircular plate across the gap to the right semicircular plate. A magnetic field pierces the plates from top to bottom. A dotted line labeled external beam spirals outward from the center of the cyclotron, making four revolutions inside the semicircular plates before reaching the outer edge of the cyclotron.
Cyclotrons use a magnetic field to cause particles to move in circular orbits. As the particles pass between the plates of the Ds, the voltage across the gap is oscillated to accelerate them twice in each orbit.

Modern behemoths and colliding beams

Physicists have built ever-larger machines, first to reduce the wavelength of the probe and obtain greater detail, then to put greater energy into collisions to create new particles. Each major energy increase brought new information, sometimes producing spectacular progress, motivating the next step. One major innovation was driven by the desire to create more massive particles. Since momentum needs to be conserved in a collision, the particles created by a beam hitting a stationary target should recoil. This means that part of the energy input goes into recoil kinetic energy, significantly limiting the fraction of the beam energy that can be converted into new particles. One solution to this problem is to have head-on collisions between particles moving in opposite directions. Colliding beams are made to meet head-on at points where massive detectors are located. Since the total incoming momentum is zero, it is possible to create particles with momenta and kinetic energies near zero. Particles with masses equivalent to twice the beam energy can thus be created. Another innovation is to create the antimatter counterpart of the beam particle, which thus has the opposite charge and circulates in the opposite direction in the same beam pipe. For a schematic representation, see [link] .

The first image shows a circular ring made up of about thirty blue tubes whose diameters are much less than the diameter of the ring. The tubes are arranged end-to-end, so that a line joining their axes forms the ring. The second image shows a close-up view of three consecutive tubes, which we shall call tubes one, two, and three. Tube one is labeled plus, tube two is labeled minus, and tube three is labeled plus. An arrow labeled E points from tube one to tube two, and between these two tubes is a sphere labeled p plus. The third image is the same as the second, except that the tubes one, two, and three are labeled minus, plus, minus, respectively. In addition, the arrow labeled E between tubes one and two has reversed direction, and a second arrow labeled E now appears pointing from tube two to tube three. Between tubes two and three appears the sphere labeled p plus.
(a) A synchrotron has a ring of magnets and accelerating tubes. The frequency of the accelerating voltages is increased to cause the beam particles to travel the same distance in shorter time. The magnetic field should also be increased to keep each beam burst traveling in a fixed-radius path. Limits on magnetic field strength require these machines to be very large in order to accelerate particles to very high energies. (b) A positive particle is shown in the gap between accelerating tubes. (c) While the particle passes through the tube, the potentials are reversed so that there is another acceleration at the next gap. The frequency of the reversals needs to be varied as the particle is accelerated to achieve successive accelerations in each gap.

On the left side of the image is a pair of equal-diameter, horizontal rings, with one labeled proton source and the other labeled anti proton source. The rings look like they are made of a hose; that is, their cross section is circular and they appear hollow. In the proton-source ring blue arrows appear indicating counterclockwise motion inside the hose. In the anti-proton-source ring, red arrows appear indicating clockwise motion inside the hose. A section of hose tangentially leaves each ring to tangentially join another larger ring to the right, which is labeled main ring. Both blue arrows and red arrows appear in the main ring, indicating simultaneous clockwise and counterclockwise motion. From the main ring two tangential hose sections exit to join a similar-sized ring situated beneath the main ring and that is labeled tevatron ring. In the tevatron ring, the blue arrows go half-way around clockwise and the red arrows go half-way around counterclockwise. They meet in a cube labeled collision detector and that has a yellow starburst icon on it.
This schematic shows the two rings of Fermilab’s accelerator and the scheme for colliding protons and antiprotons (not to scale).

Detectors capable of finding the new particles in the spray of material that emerges from colliding beams are as impressive as the accelerators. While the Fermilab Tevatron had proton and antiproton beam energies of about 1 TeV, so that it can create particles up to 2 TeV/ c 2 size 12{2`"TeV/"c rSup { size 8{2} } } {} , the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) has achieved beam energies of 3.5 TeV, so that it has a 7-TeV collision energy; CERN hopes to double the beam energy in 2014. The now-canceled Superconducting Super Collider was being constructed in Texas with a design energy of 20 TeV to give a 40-TeV collision energy. It was to be an oval 30 km in diameter. Its cost as well as the politics of international research funding led to its demise.

Practice Key Terms 6

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Source:  OpenStax, College physics. OpenStax CNX. Jul 27, 2015 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col11406/1.9
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