• Question: if you could what would you rather work on the particle accelerator or hadron collider

    Asked by mlg radiation420 to Susan, Rob, Rebecca, Josh, Chris on 14 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      I don’t understand this question. The hadron collider *is* a particle accelerator! There are many particle accelerators, used for many different things from particle physics through chemistry, biology and engineering to cancer treatment: “the” particle accelerator doesn’t make sense.

      If you can clarify your question, I’ll happily attempt an answer!

    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Well the hadron collider experiment has lots of particle accelerators to get the particles travelling really fast before they crash (collide) into each other. I reckon the collider is the business end – that’s where all the interesting science is going to happen, whereas the accelerator is like the train tracks to get the particles to the collider.

      Interestingly, we had an MRI scanner at Nottingham that I worked on. We didn’t need it as an MRI scanner any more as it had got really old, but the superconducting magnet inside it is still good – so that has been shipped to help with focussing particles into a tight beam at a particle accelerator (I think it’s at the hadron collider).

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