From Radioactive Decay to Accelerators and Colliders
Currrent accelerators have increased energies
per beam particle to about 100,000 time that available in
radioactive decays. Since electrical forces are used to accelerate
beam particles, the particles must be electrically charged.
In practice, the beam particles are either electrons or protons,
or their anti-particles, positrons or antiprotons.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will accelerate
two counter-rotating beams of protons to energies of 7 TeV,
about a million times larger than the energies of radioactive
decay. The goal will be to have protons from one beam collide
with protons from the other, hence the name "Collider".
