What is the purpose of particle acceleration and why do we need to accelerate particles instead of viewing them in their current “normal” state?
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One of the best explanation i heard: Imagine a clock, you can see it from outside but you wonder how it works, so you want to open it, but you don’t have right screwdriver to do so. Whay can you do? easiest thing would be to just destroy the clock and see what will fall from inside, fortunately you have a lot of exactly same clock so you can do it multiple times and because each try gives you different damage you can slowly underatand how the clock is built inside.
The same principle works with partocke physic, easier way to uderstad them is to smash them open
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There are many different kinds of particle accelerators used for many different purposes. The majority are actually used for medicine or engineering. You can do all kinds of things with streams of high-energy radiation, such as destroying cancer cells, studying the structure of materials, or doping silicon to make semiconductors.
If you’re talking about why they’re needed for certain kinds of fundamental physics research, there are a few reasons. You can infer certain things about particles from how they move and interact at high speed. For example, the way they move in a magnetic field can tell you about their charge and mass. Some particles have such short lifetimes that if you want to do anything with them, you need them to move fast. More importantly, colliding particles with each other can create new kinds of particles. Some of these particles exist around us but are much easier to study if you create large numbers of them under controlled conditions. Others can’t be found on earth – they will be produced in the much higher-energy conditions found in stars, but will fail to penetrate our atmosphere.
Most of the particles that we want to study are very unstable, and so we just cannot find them in their normal state. However, if we smash two smaller and more abundant particles together at very high speed, the bigger unstable particles get created, and we can study them.
Imagine a universe thats really cold, only ice exists, no liquid water is around. We know that a long long time ago the universe had a bunch of liquid water. So let’s try to study liquid water to understand things about the early universe.
Scientists figured that if we shoot together two ice cubes at high velocity we release so much energy that the ice melts and we have some liquid water for a very short period of time. We can’t look at the water directly, what we can do is to wait till it expands and cools and small ice crystals “freeze-out” from the water and we detect these out-flying crystals with detectors. We study the “shrapnel”, we figure things out about the source and understand the early universe.
We are doing the same with nuclei. Heavy ions are the ice cubes, the water is quark gluon plasma, and hadrons (particle made of quarks) are the ice crystals that freeze-out. By studying quarks gluon plasma we build understanding about the conditions in the very early universe.
We can also accelerate electrons to look into a proton for example. These are scattering experiments. The earliest scattering experiments allowed us to “see” inside the atom and discover the nucleus and now we are looking into the structure of hadrons themselves.
You want to know what’s inside the typical Volkswagen Jetta. (You are asking this question because you, like every normal person, has observed anomalous behaviour from Jettas in the wild.
Luckily, you have an infinite supply of Jettas. So you decide to crack a few open to see what’s inside.
Your first attempts, head-on at 10 m/s, yield only boring bits of fenders and the occasional bolt. Your village physicist suggests more speed.
So you try higher and higher speeds. Even higher. You convince the federal Energy Department to fund your experiments. Now you can collide Jettas at 1,000,000 m/s. Lots of fascinating data, and body parts, come flying out.
After expending roughly the GDP of a typical EU country, you now have a theory about Jettas and their highway behavior. You publish a paper. Everybody cheers, except the stockholders of VW.
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