colliders

A collider is a scientific facility that accelerates two or more beams of charged particles to high energies and makes them collide. By studying the resulting debris with complex detectors, physicists probe the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces between them. Colliders access energy scales beyond those available in ordinary experiments and have led to discoveries such as the Higgs boson.

A collider includes a particle source, a system to accelerate the beams, magnets to steer and focus them, radiofrequency cavities to supply energy, and detectors positioned at the collision points. In circular colliders the beams travel in opposite directions around a closed ring; in linear colliders, two beams are accelerated in straight lines and collide at a single point.

Circular colliders rely on bending magnets to keep beams on the closed path. Energy loss due to synchrotron radiation limits lighter particles at high energy, making protons well suited for circular machines. Linear colliders aim to collide electrons and positrons with reduced energy loss, but require long accelerators and highly synchronized, high-brightness beams.

Notable examples include the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which discovered the Higgs boson in 2012; the Tevatron at Fermilab, and the earlier LEP collider at CERN. Linear projects such as the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC) and compact linear collider (CLIC) have been studied to complement circular machines.

Detectors surrounding interaction points capture charged tracks, calorimetric energy deposits, and particle identities. General-purpose detectors like ATLAS and CMS at the LHC study a wide range of phenomena, while specialized detectors examine specific processes or heavy-ion collisions. Results inform the Standard Model and guide searches for new physics.