&--Friday, June 8, 2007 ; 11:37 AM
EldwinSchrodinger @ Particle Accelerators
EldwinSchrodinger @ Particle Accelerators
loving you always ♥
For so long, teams of physicists are trying to find out an answer to the colliding particles which give out other subatomic particles such as neutrinos, fermions or gravitons or other particles that made up an atom. well already these particles are incredibly small. we're still hoping to find an answer for supersymmetry. with CERN, probably they could find antiparticles such as sneutrinos, gluinos, squarks and etc. also hoping to find an answer to string theory as well as a unified theory to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity. well if superstrings are smaller than the planck length. its no doubt modern technologies could prove this theory as yet. but well to understand a particle accelerator. we must first need to know how it works. these accelerators speed up the particles till its near the speed of light. ( electromagnetism is needed in this process) so they'll collide 2 particles together.
inside the pipe, particles are accelerated by electric fields. powerful amplifiers provide intense radio waves that are fed into resonating structures, the radio-frequency (RF) cavities. each time the particles traverse an RF cavity, some of the energy of the radio wave is transferred to them and they are accelerated.to make a more effective use of a limited number of RF cavities, accelerator designers can force the particle beam to go through them many times, by curving its trajectory into a closed loop. That is why most accelerators will look roughly circular.curving the beam's path is usually achieved by the magnetic field of dipole magnets. this is because the magnetic force exerted on charged particles is always perpendicular to their velocity. perfect for curving the trajectory! The higher the energy of a particle, the stronger the field that is needed to bend it. This means that, as the maximum magnetic field is limited (to some 2 tesla for conventional magnets, some 10 Tesla for superconducting ones), the more powerful a machine is, the larger it needs to be.
in addition to just curving the beam, it is also necessary to focus it. just like a beam of light, a particle beam diverges if left on its own. focusing the beam allows its width and height to be constrained so that it stays inside the vacuum chamber. this is achieved by quadrupole magnets, which act on the beam of charged particles exactly the same way a lens would act on a beam of light.
inside the pipe, particles are accelerated by electric fields. powerful amplifiers provide intense radio waves that are fed into resonating structures, the radio-frequency (RF) cavities. each time the particles traverse an RF cavity, some of the energy of the radio wave is transferred to them and they are accelerated.to make a more effective use of a limited number of RF cavities, accelerator designers can force the particle beam to go through them many times, by curving its trajectory into a closed loop. That is why most accelerators will look roughly circular.curving the beam's path is usually achieved by the magnetic field of dipole magnets. this is because the magnetic force exerted on charged particles is always perpendicular to their velocity. perfect for curving the trajectory! The higher the energy of a particle, the stronger the field that is needed to bend it. This means that, as the maximum magnetic field is limited (to some 2 tesla for conventional magnets, some 10 Tesla for superconducting ones), the more powerful a machine is, the larger it needs to be.
in addition to just curving the beam, it is also necessary to focus it. just like a beam of light, a particle beam diverges if left on its own. focusing the beam allows its width and height to be constrained so that it stays inside the vacuum chamber. this is achieved by quadrupole magnets, which act on the beam of charged particles exactly the same way a lens would act on a beam of light.
Labels: Accelerators
