How to Design a Particle Accelerator

How do you go about designing a particle accelerator? Suzie Sheehy discusses how they work, what form they take, and what champagne means to an accelerator physicist. Watch more films in our series on particle accelerators: Please answer our survey about this film, and you could win £100: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has captured the imagination of the public. But particle accelerators take many shapes, and there are tens of thousands of other accelerators in use every day around the world. Dr Suzie Sheehy designs particle accelerators. In this animation she leads us through the world of accelerators. They all share the same basic ingredients of an accelerator: particles, energy, control, collision and detection, and typically fall into three categories: linear, cyclotron and synchrotron. The applications of accelerators range from individual medical care to answering the bigg