I recently saw a Cleo Abrams video about particle accelerators and the lead scientist said that they use particle accelerators to create the building blocks for future innovations.
I’m sure advancements have been made only because particle accelerators exist but I don’t know any. Can someone highlight a direct influence particle accelerators have on our daily lives?
In: Physics
Many particle accelerators are doing research purely in nuclear/particle physics. However, almost every major country now builds so-called “light sources” which produce high energy intense beams of light. They are extremely popular and drive a lot of research in biology, solid state, drug research, etc.
I would say the major contribution of the particle accelerators is spin-offs. We developed, for example, the fast, sensitive X-ray detectors that replaced film in most dentists offices. CCD (charge coupled devices) now used in cameras were originally developed for use in physics experiments. Superconducting magnets (especially the design of the wires) was first developed for accelerator work. Now there is a superconducting magnet (MRI) in every hospital in the developed world. Finally, the internet and World Wide Web and electronic publication methods were invented specifically to facilitate the work of high energy physics laboratories.
Compact linear accelerators are used in machines (such as ones from Varian) that deliver radiation to tumors to treat cancer.
Also, lots of x-ray machines have a linear accelerator inside of them. You basically crash a lot of high speed electrons at a solid target like Tungsten or Molybdenum, and that produces x-rays which are used for medical imaging.
The need to collate and dissiminate the huge amounts of data and research generated at the CERN accelerator led to the creation of the world wide web. This let even ordinary people create websites and/or share things such as vidoes over the internet which has annoyed a lot of people.
The most famous advancement was by Tim Berners-Lee, who wanted to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. So he wrote a software program called ENQUIRE, this was the first Wiki (1980).
In 1989, he proposed and later prototyped a new hypertext project in response to a request for a simple, immediate, information-sharing facility, to be used among physicists working at CERN and other academic institutions. He called the project “WorldWideWeb”.
The World Wide Web (www) and HTML were invented by CERN physicists who wanted to share data world wide (at LEP, the machine before LHC)
The Internet had been around for 20 years before (military use), and nobody in the normal world used it.
The WWW created all the online business and their revenue. This has paid back all of fundamental science for the next century at least.
CRT tvs ARE particle accelerators
Most elements after Uranium can only exist on earth by being created iin a particle accelerator, many are used in medical devices.
modern microscopes are particle accelerstors that watch how the cores of atoms reflect the particles to tell exactly what is there.
“particle accelerator” is such a vague term it refers to literally hundreds of different devices.
It depends what you mean by “advancement”. A lot of the answers have focused on practical technological applications but I think that somewhat misses the point. The main thing that big expensive particle accelerators like Large Hadron Collider, which I think is more what you were asking about, get us, is knowledge. It can take decades more for us to figure out what we can do with the knowledge, but the knowledge is the point.
The electron was discovered in the late 1800s using a very early kind of particle accelerator. Think of all the things that we have done in the last 150 years and will continue to do in the future, because we know about electrons.
We just used particle colliders to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson. This is another elementary particle that has improved our knowledge of the world. 150 years from now there could well be lots of technology that derives it’s existence from those experiments that confirmed the Higgs Boson.
As luck would have iti follow a particle physicist from CERN in Geneva on IG and she has a video answering this exact question:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5hXcm7tjGO/?igsh=MTVtcGJ4OGJ2bnlzZg==
A lot of extra inventions/innovations are done besides particle physics. For example the ceph storage software used to store the usage amount of data. They also did a lot stuff for Openstack
Also al the knowledge used to built those accelerators is not used only there.
I am sure I forget a lot
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