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Your group may decide to "design an accelerator," or you may choose to emphasize only certain topics. These questions concerning big concepts may help you decide what to investigate about accelerators:
  1. What are several reasons that physicists need higher-energy accelerators? (What happens to energy, velocity, mass, and momentum as particles "accelerate"?)
    Data for Fermilab's Tevatron
  2. How do accelerators actually accelerate particles?
  3. What factors must change if an accelerator is designed for higher energy?
  4. What are the different uses for magnets in accelerators?
    Data for magnetic fields at several accelerators

More detailed questions to investigate:

  1. Why are most accelerators round? Advantages/disadvantages?
  2. Why isn't DC used for acceleration?
  3. Why are higher-energy accelerators larger?
  4. How are antiparticles produced?
  5. Why/how do they bunch particles?
  6. Why/how do they increase luminosity?
  7. How do accelerators (and detectors) limit what particles can be discovered and studied?
  8. What is synchrotron radiation? Uses and disadvantages?
  9. Questions that you have:
Decide what questions your group would like to investigate.
You may decide to work in subgroups, sharing information.