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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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.
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