What is the worlds largest particle accelerator?
It’s called the Large Hadron Collider, and was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) beneath the Franco-Swiss border. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadro… At full power, the LHC will accelerate trillions of protons to 99.9999% the speed of light. Two beams of protons will each attain a maximum energy of 7 TeV (7 trillion electron-volts), with head-to-head collisions of 14 TeV. An electron-volt is the amount of energy gained by an electron passing through a potential difference of one volt. It’s smaller than minuscule: 1 eV = 1.60217646 × 10^-19 joules so, 14 TeV = 2.24304705 × 10-6 joules To put that into perspective, the collisions of pairs of protons has the energy comparable to a mosquito in flight. No kidding. In comparison, cosmic rays hit the atmosphere every day with up to 20,000,000 times the energy. See this link for one, called the Oh My God, particle detected on Octo
