Read article 'Charting a course for advanced accelerators'
Progress in experimental particle physics is driven by advances in accelerators. The conversion of storage rings into colliders in the 1970s is one example, another is the use of superconducting magne...
Read article 'Xenon beams light path to gamma factory'
On 14 September, CERN injected a beam of partially ionised xenon atoms into the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and kept it circulating for a short period. The successful demonstration, carried out by ...
Read article 'CLEAR prospects for accelerator research'
A new user facility for accelerator R&D, the CERN Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR), started operation in August and is ready to provide beam for experiments.
Read article 'China neutron source sees first beam'
In late August, the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) produced its first neutron beam, representing an important milestone for the $280 million project. The world’s fourth pulsed spallation neu...
Read article 'Injecting new life into the LHC'
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most famous and powerful of all CERN’s machines, colliding intense beams of protons at an energy of 13 TeV. But its success relies on a series of smaller mac...
Read article 'ITER’s massive magnets enter production'
As Matthew Chalmers reported in 2017, completion of the first toroidal-field coil for ITER demonstrates niobium-tin superconductor technology on a gigantic scale.
Read article 'Revamped HIE-ISOLDE serves experiments'
CERN’s long-running radioactive-ion-beam facility ISOLDE, which produces beams for a wide range of scientific communities, has recently been upgraded to allow higher-energy beams. In July, the secon...
Read article 'Powering the field forward'
Particle physicists try to understand the environment that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang by studying the behaviour of particles at high energies. Early studies relied on cosmic rays...
Read article 'Souped up RF'
Behind the size, complexity and physics goals of particle accelerators such as the LHC lies a simple physics principle worked out by Maxwell more than 150 years ago: when a charged particle passes th...
Read article 'Superconductors and particle physics entwined'
Superconductivity is a mischievous phenomenon. Countless superconducting materials were discovered following Onnes’ 1911 breakthrough, but none with the right engineering properties. Even today, mor...
