# Tag Info

2

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-boggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Specifically space is big compared to the size of even normal stars, and of course black holes are many times smaller than stars. Stars are so small compared to the ...

1

The principal advantage of using electrons is that the electron is a fundamental particle so electron-electron (or electron-positron) collisions are are well defined process that is relatively eay to describe mathematically, and very accurate measurements can be made. By contrast the proton is a composite particle. We normally describe the proton as being ...

0

Very good answers above! I would just add one simple point to be more specific to your question. The LHC uses anything it can smash together just to see whats inside. The other Synchrotrons use electrons because its easy to shake radiation out of them and Synchrotron radiation is what they want to produce. The same way bumping electrons will produce photons ...

2

I'm researching synchrotrons for a class project, but I can't seem to find a decent answer to one of my questions. It appears that most synchrotrons use electrons as opposed to some other charged particle, while the Large Hadron Collider uses protons instead.. The first thing that you should know is that there are two completely different uses for ...

2

The quantity that determines what a particle beam may be used for is called gamma ($\gamma$). It is defined as $$\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-\left(\frac{v}{c}\right)^2}}.$$ As $v$ gets closer to $c$, $\gamma$ gets larger without bound and equals infinity when $v = c$. Since particles in a synchrotron are moving at very close to the speed of light ...

Top 50 recent answers are included