It takes years of on-the-job training to learn the ins and outs of particle accelerator operation. Despite the fact that accelerator operators are essential to keeping an accelerator laboratory afloat ...

Some of the most fundamental questions about our universe are also the most difficult to answer. Questions like what gives matter its mass, what is the invisible 96 percent of the universe made of, ...

Deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland is the most massive, most ambitious experiment ever undertaken by humanity. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator that uses a ...

Texas A&M University professor Peter McIntyre and his colleagues want to build a particle accelerator around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico in order to discover the most fundamental building blocks of ...

Traditional particle accelerators, including radiofrequency linear accelerators and synchrotrons, have pushed physics forward for decades. They are also expensive, physically large, and limited in how ...

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 ...

Just a few hundred feet from where we are sitting is a large metal chamber devoid of air and draped with the wires needed to control the instruments inside. A beam of particles passes through the ...

Plasma, the fourth state of matter, consists of a gas in which electrons are no longer bound to atoms, which allows electricity to flow freely. When beams of particles moving close to the speed of ...