“To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe you have to build the biggest machine in the world."
The Guardian
The cyclotron was a subatomic particle accelerator that used a magnetic field to force the particles to move around a circular path in a thin, doughnut- shaped vacuum chamber, with a fixed frequency electric field for acceleration. This was then developed into the synchrotron, in which both the magnetic and the electrical fields could be varied. By decreasing the frequency of the applied voltage as the electrons move faster, the accelerating voltage and the orbiting particles could be synchronized. This phase stability ensured that the particles that were going too fast were accelerated less than those going too slowly, and the result was a stable cloud of particles that were gradually accelerated together. In 1945 two proposals for a synchrotron were put forward, one by Edwin McMillan (1907-1991) in the United States and the other by Vladimir Veksler in the U.S.S.R.
Soon a host of synchrotrons were being built. Collisions between the particles that they accelerated could be used to study their structures, and the synchrotron radiation that these particles emitted could be used as a source for investigation in the far ultraviolet and X-ray regions of the spectrum.
Completed in 1983, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in the United States is 3.9 miles (6.3 km) in diameter and it accelerates protons and antiprotons to enormous energies and then lets them collide. A sevenfold increase in final energy is obtained by the newer Large Hadron Collider (16.6 miles/26.7 km in diameter) at the European Laboratory for High Energy Physics (CERN) on the Switzerland/France border.
