Quote:
Originally Posted by dd74
Mike - is that an accelerator or collider (or is an accelerator and collider the same thing)?
Does it make a noise when operating?
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Our facility has a linear accelerator (linac) that creates a proton beam and then sends the beam into a ring where it is "chopped" into pulses and then the pulses are slammed into a liquid mercury target (about 20 tons of mercury) to produce neutrons. We use the neutrons for material and physics research. So...technically an accelerator only does the accelerating where a collider uses accelerators to generate beams to smash into each other. Our accelerator is only capable of about 1 GeV, but there are ways to increase that. LHC is on the TeV scale. Much larger energies, but then again, their beam is much smaller than ours.
IIRC, the tunnel that the LHC is constructed in was built for something else and the LHC simply utilized it because it was already there. Building a bigger one would have been nice, but everything comes with a price.