How do particle accelerators keep the heat inside their chamber contained, and how do the construction materials resist the insane temperature?

Question

If particle accelerators’ internal temperature/beam can get to millions of degrees, how do they not melt or damage their surrounding encasing? The highest temperature resistant materials go only up to a few thousand degrees, so shouldn’t they easily be melted?

In: Physics

Answer 1

There’s temperature, and there’s heat. The bit that’s reaching millions of degrees may only be a few hundred/thousand particles. Compared to the absurd number of particles that are in the particle accelerators structure (remember that 1 gram of a material is on the order of 10^20 molecules, so for a machine that weighs many tons, there’s a lot more cold material than the superhot material), this is very little. It’s like striking a match and holding it up against a tree. Yes, the temperature is hot enough to ignite wood, but the tree is so massive that you’ll never actually set the tree on fire. You can’t heat the tree up enough with a single match to get it burning.

Edit: generalized Avogadro’s constant.