When you think of a particle accelerator, you usually think of some giant cyclotron with heavy-duty equipment in a massive mad-science lab. But scientists now believe they can create particle ...

Particle accelerators are often framed as exotic machines built only to chase obscure particles, but they are really precision tools that use electric fields and magnets to steer tiny beams of matter ...

A beam of electrons crossed just a few millimeters of plasma, then helped trigger an effect that usually belongs to massive research sites. In this case, the light produced fell in the extreme ...

Banks of computer screens stacked two and three high line the walls. The screens are covered with numbers and graphs that are unintelligible to an untrained eye. But they tell a story to the operators ...

CERN's large hadron collider is responsible for discovering the Higgs boson particle in 2012, which confirmed a hypothesis ...

Proof-of-concept experimental setup used to generate an extreme ultraviolet (XUV) free-electron laser (FEL) driven by a laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) electron beam. An intense laser pulse, ...

Whenever SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's linear accelerator is on, packs of around a billion electrons each travel together at nearly the speed of light through metal piping. These electron ...

Particle accelerators (often referred to as “atom smashers”) use strong electric fields to push streams of subatomic particles—usually protons or electrons—to tremendous speeds. Accelerators by the ...

This sample of niobium has been treated in a process that is typical for preparing particle accelerator components. Tests have revealed how adding oxygen to such components makes them more efficient.

If you get a chance to visit a computer history museum and see some of the very old computers, you’ll think they took up a full room. But if you ask, you’ll often find that the power supply was in ...

Every time two beams of particles collide inside an accelerator, the universe lets us in on a little secret. Sometimes it's a particle no one has ever seen. Other times, it's a fleeting glimpse of ...