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 ...

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 ...

Plasma, the fourth state of matter, consists of a gas in which electrons are no longer bound to atoms, which allows ...

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 ...

Particle accelerators are some of the most complicated machines in science. Scientists are working on ways to run them with a diminishing amount of direction from humans. In 2015, operators at the ...

Laser physicists have built a novel hybrid plasma accelerator. Particle accelerators have become an indispensable tool for studies of the structure of matter at sub-atomic scales, and have important ...

Alex Bogacz, a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility since 1997, has spent his career in accelerator physics solving problems. From ...

Particle accelerators produce and accelerate beams of charged particles, such as electrons, protons and ions, of atomic and sub-atomic size. They are used not only in fundamental research for an ...