Abstract
CERN lives from its particle accelerators. Via a total of four pre-accelerators, with the proton synchrotron, which was put into operation in 1959, and the super proton synchrotron from the 1970s as the last two stages, protons gain more and more energy until they are finally injected into the last stage, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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Notes
- 1.
Even if most people talk about particle accelerators and accelerated particles, it is not the speed but rather the (kinetic) energy of the particles that is important. For practical reasons, the energy is given in the unit electronvolt (eV). 1 eV corresponds to the energy of an electron or proton that has been accelerated by an electric voltage of 1 V. Larger units are MeV (1 million = 106 eV), GeV (1 billion = 109 eV), TeV (1 trillion = 1012 eV). More about the acceleration of particles can be found in Chap. 5 about particle accelerators.
- 2.
The usable energy ECM when a proton of PS hits a resting proton in the target is calculated approximately as ECM = \(\sqrt {2 \times {\text{m}}_{{\text{p}}} \times {\text{E}}} = {\mkern 1mu}\) 7.25 GeV, with the proton mass = \({\text{m}}_{{\text{p}}}\) 0.938 GeV and E = 28 GeV.
- 3.
See also design parameters of the LHC in the appendix.
- 4.
More about the synchrotron in Sect. 5.4 on circular accelerators.
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Hauschild, M. (2021). The CERN Accelerators. In: Exploring the Large Hadron Collider - CERN and the Accelerators. essentials(). Springer, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-32726-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-32726-2_2
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