Well, essentially particles don’t want to collide because they have similar charges and want to repel each other (like two similar ends of a bar magnet). So you have to give them enough energy that the repulsive force isn’t enough to stop the collision. That’s why they accelerate them really fast in a particle accelerator.
The other problem is that particles are really small – so steering the two particles into each other is fairly tricky. They do it using really powerful magnets (like the ones I design and operate).
but once the collisions has been achieved, they do what anything else does after a collision – they break up into all the bits that made them up in the first place. Unfortunately that is not really my field of work, so you might need to google it to find out what that is!
As Vicky said, the particles get pushed around the collider by giant magnets and when they are travelling at 99% the speed of light they can smash into each other and the force of this causes them to break up into smaller particles. You might already know that for a particle to decay into (or change into) a lighter particle it needs to release a lot of energy. Sometimes this energy can be in the form of lots of smaller particles, and so in a collider you might get lots of different particles coming out from the one collision, but the next time you run the same experiment you might get a different set of particles coming out – and thats why we have to do the same experiment thousands of times before we can give a final result 🙂
I assume you mean colliding particles at the LHC as this is the particle physics zone.
Protons are accelerated by RF cavities in the LHC and bent around the circumference of the ring using powerful magnets. Bunches of protons are circulated in opposite directions and are collided in 4 points around the LHC circumference where the experiment are located. Since the protons have a lot of energy, and energy can be converted to mass using E=mc2, new particles with a high mass can be created. One of these particle is the Higgs boson but many more are studied such as top quarks, Z and W bosons and many more.
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