What does a particle accelerator do and how is it useful to us?
In: Planetary Science
Imagine giant aliens discovered our automobiles. They don’t know anything about our engines, or screwdrivers, or anything at all about the parts of a car or that different parts are plastic and steel and aluminum. Eventually, they get the idea to crash two of our cars into each other at crazy fast speeds using a giant rubber slingshot to see what happens.
When the cars slam into each other and break apart, the alien get much better understandings by observing the pieces during the collision. They see the engine fly out of one car, and the bumper off another, but they don’t know what exactly they do. From how some of the other parts fly away, they figure out some pieces are lighter than others and start figuring out material properties of plastic and steel. They keep doing this again and again and note that every car has many of the same basic components, but some of them are arranged in different ways.
This is how a super collider works. We can’t actually deal with the atomic particles, but we can get them going super fast and smash them into each other. This lets us start figuring out things in physics that we normally wouldn’t be able to discover. This might lead to new science and uses down the road that we can’t even imagine today.
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