What does a particle accelerator do and how is it useful to us?
In: Planetary Science
For once, the name is perfectly self explanatory. It accelerates particles.
How is it useful is the more complex and interesting question, because there isn’t just one particle accelerator, and different types have different uses.
But to keep it relatively simple, there’s three main things particle accelerators are used for:
1) The most famous, like LHC, are particle smashers. They smash particles together and see what happens after. It’s a window to fundamental physics, that’s how new particles and other phenomena are discovered.
2) Generating really intense radiation. Because of physics that I won’t get into, having particles go round abd round creates lots of radiation (it’s called synchrotron radiation). It turns out that this can be fairly useful for scanning things. Think x-ray on steroids.
3) Generating radioactive isotopes. This one is a fairly unknown use for how common and important it is. Many medical scans in hospitals use radioactive dyes. The radioactive materials in those dyes are very fast decaying, so they need to be manufactured shortly before use. That’s done in comparatively lower powered accelerators smashing atoms together to get heavier, radioactive elements.
Then there’s some more specific, one-off uses that would take a technical explanation for each because they investigate very specific phenomena.
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