There are 2 types of atom smashers: linear and circular. Linacs (linear accelerators) are in a line, while the other is a circle. Shouldn’t linacs be not as good as circular accelerators since circular colliders have unlimited space to accelerate while linacs have a limited amount? I understand it might need more force to go in a circle but the length makes up for it.
In: Physics
This is like saying a pistol is obsolete because of rifles so we should stop using them.
I’m not that deep into accelerators, and while it is true that circular are “better”, it will all depend on what you need an accel for. If your experiment requires data easily achievable by a simple linear, why bother going into the queues of circular accelerators?
Electrons lose energy when you bend them around a curve, so electron accelerators tend to be linear. You also have the problem for other particles that the higher the speed, the bigger the circle has to be or you can’t get magnets powerful enough to make the particles take the turn. Like if we wanted to have some much higher powered than CERN, the circle would have to be a lot bigger.
Radiation losses are greater in cyclotrons (the circular accelerators), which means it takes more energy input to get equivalent kinetic energy for the particles. However, they are more compact in design.
Some accelerators start with a cyclotrons to ramp up to a particular point, then fire those into a linear accelerator to increase the efficiency.
Linacs also work great in colleges because those physics majors need something to train on.
Linear accelerators are getting a very good second life as x-ray sources. They can be made into extremely bright sources that are in very high demand. Look into free electron lasers.
I watched a talk about a year ago by some people doing research on plasma physics, and iirc they talked about plasma particle accelerators, which are linear, and actually *much* more efficient than the circular accelerators we have now.
The only problem is they’re just super hard to make. But if they get better at it, iirc they said a linear plasma accelerator thats like 30 feet long could be as good as CERN LHC.
It depends on the application. Whether one design is better than the other depends on lots of things:
What is the purpose of the accelerator… Research, medical, or industrial?
What is the desired energy of the beam?
How much land is available?
How much money is available?
Is there existing infrastructure/technology that can be repurposed toward the new machine?
All of these and more are optimized to determine what type of machine to build.
Edit: and to add to this, circular machines do not have unlimited space to accelerate. Beam power loss in circular machines is proportional to the 4th power of the beam energy over the bend radius. Higher energy beam needs a larger radius accelerator in order to not lose its energy to synchroton radiation.
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