What does a particle accelerator do and how is it useful to us?
In: Planetary Science
It’s like the name says. It accelerates particles.
Okay, that’s definitely not satisfactory. Let’s try that again. By using carefully calibrated electromagnets, a particle accelerator gets charged particles up to a generous portion of the speed of light. But that’s not the important thing. It’s what happens after they’re accelerated that scientists want to pay attention to. If you have two streams of particles that go in opposite directions and get them to collide with each other in the right spot, they’ll release huge amounts of energy which produce other more exotic particles that can only last for a minuscule amount of time. Special sensors then detect either these new particles or the product of their decay.
Why is it useful? There are a lot of competing theories on precisely how subatomic particles work. Each has different predictions for what more exotic particles can do, and the results of those collisions can make or break these theories, so that theoretical physicists might have to either scrap or refine them. Depending on what the theories predict, they might lead to physical laws that we weren’t previously aware of that we might be able to harness at some point in the future.
tl;dr: Particle accelerators smack subatomic particles together at near light speed and we then sift through the debris to see if it matches what we expect.
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