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Senin, 22 Juni 2009

Particle accelerator I Uses of particle accelerators I Linear particle accelerators I Tandem electrostatic accelerators

Particle accelerator
A particle accelerator (or atom smasher) is a device that uses electric fields to propel electrically-charged particles to high speeds and to contain them in well-defined beams. An ordinary CRT television set is a simple form of accelerator. There are two basic types: linear accelerators and circular accelerators.

Uses of particle accelerators
Beams of high-energy particles are useful for both fundamental and applied research in the sciences. For the most basic inquiries into the dynamics and structure of matter, space, and time, physicists seek the simplest kinds of interactions at the highest possible energies. These typically entail particle energies of many GeV, and the interactions of the simplest kinds of particles: leptons (e.g. electrons and positrons) and quarks for the matter, or photons and gluons for the field quanta. Since isolated quarks are experimentally unavailable due to color confinement, the simplest available experiments involve the interactions of, first, leptons with each other, and second, of leptons with nucleons, which are composed of quarks and gluons. To study the collisions of quarks with each other, scientists resort to collisions of nucleons, which at high energy may be usefully considered as essentially 2-body interactions of the quarks and gluons of which they are composed. Thus elementary particle physicists tend to use machines creating beams of electrons, positrons, protons, and anti-protons, interacting with each other or with the simplest nuclei (eg, hydrogen or deuterium) at the highest possible energies, generally hundreds of GeV or more. Nuclear physicists and cosmologists may use beams of bare atomic nuclei, stripped of electrons, to investigate the structure, interactions, and properties of the nuclei themselves, and of condensed matter at extremely high temperatures and densities, such as might have occurred in the first moments of the Big Bang. These investigations often involve collisions of heavy nuclei – of atoms like iron or gold – at energies of several GeV per nucleon. At lower energies, beams of accelerated nuclei are also used in medicine, as for the treatment of cancer.

Besides being of fundamental interest, high energy electrons may be coaxed into emitting extremely bright and coherent beams of high energy photons – ultraviolet and X ray – via synchrotron radiation, which photons have numerous uses in the study of atomic structure, chemistry, condensed matter physics, biology, and technology. Examples include the ESRF in Europe, which has recently been used to extract detailed 3-dimensional images of insects trapped in amber. Thus there is a great demand for electron accelerators of moderate (GeV) energy and high intensity.

Low-energy machines
Everyday examples of particle accelerators are cathode ray tubes found in television sets and X-ray generators. These low-energy accelerators generators use a single pair of electrodes with a DC voltage of a few thousand volts between them. In an X-ray generator, the target itself is one of the electrodes. A low-energy particle accelerator called an ion implanter is used in the manufacture of integrated circuits.

High-energy machines
DC accelerator types capable of accelerating particles to speeds sufficient to cause nuclear reactions are Cockcroft-Walton generators or voltage multipliers, which convert AC to high voltage DC, or Van de Graaff generators that use static electricity carried by belts.
The largest and most powerful particle accelerators, such as the RHIC, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (scheduled to start operation in September 2009) and the Tevatron, are used for experimental particle physics.

Particle accelerators can also produce proton beams, which can produce "proton-heavy" medical or research isotopes as opposed to the "neutron-heavy" ones made in fission reactors. An example of this type of machine is LANSCE at Los Alamos.

Linear particle accelerators
In a linear accelerator (linac), particles are accelerated in a straight line with a target of interest at one end. Linacs are very widely used – every cathode ray tube contains one. They are also used to provide an initial low-energy kick to particles before they are injected into circular accelerators. The longest linac in the world is the Stanford Linear Accelerator, SLAC, which is 3 km (2 miles) long. SLAC is an electron-positron collider.

Linear high-energy accelerators use a linear array of plates (or drift tubes) to which an alternating high-energy field is applied. As the particles approach a plate they are accelerated towards it by an opposite polarity charge applied to the plate. As they pass through a hole in the plate, the polarity is switched so that the plate now repels them and they are now accelerated by it towards the next plate. Normally a stream of "bunches" of particles are accelerated, so a carefully controlled AC voltage is applied to each plate to continuously repeat this process for each bunch.

As the particles approach the speed of light the switching rate of the electric fields becomes so high that they operate at microwave frequencies, and so RF cavity resonators are used in higher energy machines instead of simple plates.

Linear accelerators are also widely used in medicine, for radiotherapy and radiosurgery. Medical grade LINACs accelerate electrons using a klystron and a complex bending magnet arrangement which produces a beam of 6-30 million electron-volt (MeV) energy. The electrons can be used directly or they can be collided with a target to produce a beam of X-rays. The reliability, flexibility and accuracy of the radiation beam produced has largely supplanted the older use of Cobalt-60 therapy as a treatment tool.

Tandem electrostatic accelerators
In a tandem accelerator, the negatively charged ion gains energy by attraction to the very high positive voltage at the geometric centre of the pressure vessel. When it arrives at the centre region known as the high voltage terminal, some electrons are stripped from the ion. The ion then becomes positive and accelerated away by the high positive voltage. Thus, this type of accelerator is called a 'tandem' accelerator. The accelerator has two stages of acceleration, first pulling and then pushing the charged particles. An example of a tandem accelerator is ANTARES (Australian National Tandem Accelerator for Applied Research).

Source: Wikipedia

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