Japan’s Particle Accelerator Achieves First Turns

Scientists at the SuperKEKB accelerator have succeeded at circulating beams of positrons and electrons in opposite directions to study particle collisions.

AsianScientist (Mar. 14, 2016) – Japan’s SuperKEKB particle accelerator has reached a milestone—achieving its “first turns,” when beams of particles are circulated through many revolutions of an accelerator for the first time. This opens a new window into the universe, a view that will give physicists access to a record rate of particle collisions in a tiny volume in space.

On February 10, scientists at the accelerator circulated a beam of positrons moving close to the speed of light through a narrow tube around the three-kilometer circumference of its main ring, ten meters underground. About two weeks later, they succeeded in circulating a beam of electrons moving near the speed of light in the opposite direction. The two events mark the device’s first turns.

The accelerator contains rings of magnets that accelerate electrons in one direction and their anti-matter equivalent, positrons, in the opposite direction. Each stream of particles is amazingly slim, about one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Japan’s SuperKEKB accelerator is designed to deliver more than 40 times the rate of collisions between particles than its predecessor. Studying the particles produced in these collisions will give physicists a clearer view of the fundamental building blocks of the universe and provide new opportunities to explore physics that goes beyond today’s standard model of particle physics.

Within particle accelerators like SuperKEKB and others, scientists can create particles on earth not seen naturally in the universe since the first moments of the Big Bang. The collider is designed to explore “new physics” that goes beyond what scientists call the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

Next year, SuperKEKB will accelerate the two beams simultaneously, compress them into a smaller area than any other accelerator on Earth, then smash them together to produce copious quantities of the heavy particles, B mesons and tau leptons.


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Source: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Photo: KEK.
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