Chapter 6: Accelerators

This entire chapter is dedicated to explaining how an accelerator works, specifically the cascade accelerator at Fermilab. It is composed f five sequential machines, each a step up in level of complication and energy. What they put into the accelerator is protons, and they get these protons from Hydrogen gas. (They spend around $20 a year on the actual particles they accelerate) The first ring in the accelerator is called the Cockcroft-Walton electrostatic accelerator. In there, a spark tears the electron off of the Hydrogen atom, leaving only a single proton (the nucleus).

Number of electron volts		abbreviation
	Thousand electron volts	KeV
	Million electron volts	MeV
	Billion electron volts	GeV
	Trillion electron volts	TeV

Then the protons are accelerated, to 750KeV beam wich is aimed (by magnets) at the next step, which is a linac. A linac is a linear accelerator that sends these protons down a long series of radio-frequency gaps to bring them up to 200 MeV. Every time an electron crosses a gap with certain battery like and magnetic properties, its energy is increased. Next these protons are sent to a synchrotron, where their energy is again, boosted. This results in a stream of protons with 8 GeV. Now these particles going really really fast are steered into the main ring (by very very strong magnets) the Tevitron. This was the original work horse of the lab, bringing protons up to 150 GeV. Then they go to the Superconducting Tevitron ring which is the same size as the last ring (4 miles, perfect circle) and just a few feet bellow. This is the limit, bringing the energy to 900 GeV, then it is steered into the tunnel where the beam is divided into 14 lines and the lab team either provides targets to hit or antimatter to hit.

These two types of reactions serve different purposes. But the main difference is the amount of energy available for the resultant. When a particle hits a stationary object, the total energy in the system is what the moving particle brought there, but when you smash together 2 particles moving in opposite directions you have twice the energy available for the collision. The more energy the better because often times new particles are the result of these collisions, and the higher the energy, the more elementary the particles that fly off become.