Particle Accelerators

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the machines that are described as the world’s largest experiments: Particle Accelerators. A famous example of a Particle Accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, a device which stretches for nearly 30km, deep beneath the ground in a tunnel between France and Switzerland.

This enormous scale enables the particles within to be propelled to incredible speeds, reaching almost the speed of light before they smash together. The resulting debris offers insights into the fundamental building blocks of our universe, such as the Higgs Boson Particle.

These Colliders are international scientific projects costing billions of pounds, but thousands of other particle accelerators exist around the world. The process has remarkable applications in medicine, archaeology and technology.

With

Harry Cliff, Particle Physicist at the University of Cambridge

Victoria Martin

Professor of Collider Physics at the University of Edinburgh

Joseph Martin

Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Durham University.

Producer: Sam Peach

Reading list:

Jon Butterworth, A Map of the Invisible: Journeys into Particle Physics (William Heinemann Ltd, 2017)