• Question: how will we use a particle accelerator because won't it be very small?

    Asked by to Laurence, Aimee on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      A particle accelerator is anything that makes a particle move faster and faster. This is because a force acts on the particle to speed it up.
      Dropping a ball from the top of a building is a particle accelerator, because the ball accelerates due to the force of gravity.
      To get a small high energy particle accelerator, you need to be able to give a particle a massive kick in a very small distance, which is what I’m working on 🙂

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      You are right that current accelerators need to be very big to accelerate particles a lot, to very very large speeds. The one in CERN, called the LHC is basically a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 km!! So obviously we don’t manipulate the particles by hand in there! The way it works is that particles are moved around it using magnetic fields, a bit like the force of gravity accelerates the ball Aimee was dropping from the top of a building. In the LHC, it’s the magnetic force that accelerates the particles along the tunnel!

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