Why build a particle accelerator?
Introduction Particle accelerators do exactly what the name says; they are machines which accelerate (thereby increasing the energy) charged particles (usually electrons or protons, but sometimes heavy ions). Since accelerators are large and expensive, people must want those high energy particles or they wouldn’t bother. High energy particles, or else the radiation they produce, are used for many kinds of research, medical applications, and by industry. There are sources of charged particles in nature, they can be emitted through the radioactive decay of certain elements. However, these particles are of low energy, not sufficient for most present day research. Some of the first important experiments determining the structure of the atom used the products of radioactive decay. In about 1910, Rutherford bombarded gold foil with alpha particles (2 protons + 2 neutrons) emitted from radium via radioactive decay, and discovered that an atom has a well defined positive central core, the nucl
