why do we need larger hadron colliders?
In: Engineering
So, as you know, the things we touch are made up of molecules. Those molecules are made up of atoms. Those atoms are made up of protons and electrons. We know that there’s an even smaller level, but we don’t know a lot about it. The best way to figure out what it looks like at that level is to take atoms and smash them together at high speed. The bigger the accelerator, the faster the speed, and the better data we get out of it.
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The earliest particle colliders were just… tubes, with electromagnets accelerating particles into… whatever. They worked, but it became real obvious real quick that you couldn’t get any real power out of a tube, because there just wasn’t enough room to accelerate it.
So we went to circles, because then the tube becomes infinitely long, right? But then we ran into the next problem, which was that for a given size circle you can only accelerate particles *so fast* before they just smash into the walls, magnets on the sides be damned. This means that the size of the circle basically sets the upper limit on how much energy you can put into the particle. And, the faster you can smash particles together, the deeper you can peer into the inner workings of them.
Therefore, if you want to increase energy levels, you’ve gotta build a bigger circle. Building it so that a ferret or whatever can’t short out all your magnets is a plus.
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