I was watching a video about quarks and they said that they made an experiment where they fired electrons into protons and saw how they bounced.
All this makes my head hurt like.. how do they do that? How to they see what happens when the electrons are fired? How so they see where they bounce?
You can’t observe all this with microscopes right? So how does it all work?
In: Chemistry
Particle accelerators.
Large particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland or the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York all have one goal — to smash individual subatomic particles together and see what happens.
Ever heard of a rail gun? Instead of a traditional bullet which operates on the principle of expanding gasses in a confined space (i.e. the gun barrel), a rail gun uses powerful magnets with precise timing to accelerate a projectile down a channel. The result is a bullet that exits the gun with a much higher velocity than could ever be achieved with gunpowder, with a much higher level of accuracy.
Particle accelerators do the same thing, but with atoms. Using powerful magnets, they accelerate two particles in opposite directions through a giant ring, then smash them together once they’ve hit a good fraction of the speed of light. The chamber where they collide is lined with all kinds of sensors and other equipment to measure the reactions.
You cannot observe things as small as atoms directly with a microscope. All we can do is theorize what might happen in these collisions based on what we think we know about them, and then design sensors to measure the effects to see how right or wrong we were.
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