A Brief History of Bangs
In 1919, Rutherford splits the atom. The next year he realises that what was produced in his experiment was a fundamental particle, the proton. He may have worked it out sooner had it not been for that fact that it looked suspiciously like the hydrogen nucleus. It took, then, another eight years for the resonance linear accelerator to be created.
This device was used by Rolf Wideröe, a German physicist, to accelerate potassium and sodium to an energy of 710 keV to split the lithium atom. The reason why he did this is unclear but in the same year a Russian physicist George Gamow showed that an atom could be split using low energy ions. This began the race to build a particle accelerator.
An English man and an Irish man go into a physics lab and build the world's smallest peashooter. Ernest Walton and Douglas Cockcroft built the first particle accelerator just one year after it had been predicted. It then took only two years for two Americans to build a cyclotron, which had to be better because it was curved. These accelerators were mainly being used to create fission reactions, and nothing mind blowing was being discovered.
Then, small particles started being invented as appropriate excuses for atomic properties. The first to be predicted was the meson, this was put forward to explain nuclear forces. Then the muon, an electron-like particle, was found, and no one knew what it was so they said it was a meson. (In fact the muon is a very big electron-like particle and it decays after 2 millionths of a second into electrons and neutrinos.) There was then a brief period of time in which nuclear physicists became greatly in demand to do fireworks displays for foreign visitors. Faced with the choice of a lot of money or a blunt object, physicists dropped their research and did their duty for their country. Or the country they were in at the time and felt the safest in. After America showed how to throw a proper fireworks' display, the first synchrotrons were built. Then the world of particle physics went mad.
Types of Accelerators
The linear accelerator is the simplest type of accelerator. Fundamentally it is a long line of coils (or drift tubes) which charged particles are accelerated through. However, there are two types of linear accelerator. One type of accelerator is the standing-wave linear accelerator; particles travel along a cylindrical vacuum tank through a series of drift tubes, separated by gaps. As the particles cross the gaps, electromagnetic waves, called standing waves, accelerate them. (Or, more simply put, as the particle passes through the drift tube, the current through it is swapped. If the current was kept it would pull the particle back towards the tube when it leaves. Changing the current repels the particle from the end of the tube.) The waves provide an electric field that speeds up the particles by acting on their electric charges.
This type of accelerator can only manage to accelerate particles to 200 MeV. (Ah, if you don't know what this is you should try and find out.) Physicists mainly use them as a primary accelerator that feeds into a synchrotron. In industry and medicine they are used as powerful X-ray machines.
The other type of linear accelerator is the travelling-wave linear accelerator. This speeds particles through a single long pipe by an electromagnetic wave that travels with the particle. This high-frequency wave is called a travelling wave. As long as the wave speed matches the particles' speed, the particles will continue to gain energy.
This type of accelerator can accelerate particles to 30 GeV, this is the Stanford Linear Collider, the longest accelerator in the world at 3.2km. The SLC is used to smash electrons and positrons into each other at 50 GeV to create uncharged weak bosons (the particle for the nuclear weak force).
The more advanced type of particle accelerator is the cyclotron. The idea behind these accelerators relies on the understanding of the effects of fields on charged particles. A cyclotron is made of two magnets and two D-shaped electrode