• Question: With the invention of circular accelerators, is there any need for Linacs any more? (apart from to feed particles into circular ones)

    Asked by josiepaton to David on 17 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: David Freeborn

      David Freeborn answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      Hi josiepaton,

      The answer is: yes! There are different advantages to circular accelerators and linacs, but the next big accelerator to be built (the so called International Linear Collider or ILC), probably in Japan, will be a linac.

      When a particle is accelerated in a circle, it loses energy in a process called Bremsstrahlung. To keep a particle in a circle, we need to keep “accelerating” it, just to make up for the lost energy.

      Lighter particles lose energy much faster than heavy particles, so if we want to collider very small particles together, Linacs are definitely still the way to go.

      In fact, the LHC might be the last circular accelerator for many years. More and more, we want to build Linacs now.

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