Particle Accelerator

A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to speed up charged particles to very high energies and hold them in a tightly defined beam, used for basic physics research as well as medical and industrial work. Electrostatic accelerators use a constant electric field to boost a particle's energy in a single pass, while electrodynamic accelerators use changing electromagnetic fields, either through magnetic induction or oscillating radio waves, to add energy over many passes and so reach far higher energies than a constant field allows. The technology grew out of work in the 1920s by Rolf Wideroe, Gustav Ising, Leo Szilard, Max Steenbeck and Ernest Lawrence, who between them built the first linear accelerator, betatron and cyclotron; Lawrence's 1929 cyclotron was a turning point, and these early machines were nicknamed atom smashers because researchers fired particle beams at atomic nuclei to study their structure through the resulting collisions. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/