Focus point on high-energy accelerators: advances, challenges, and applications

Abstract

Particle accelerators are unique scientific tools that offer unrivalled energy per constituent of their charged particle beams compared to sources normally available in laboratories. Focused high-density beams of electrons, positrons, protons, antiprotons, ions, and other elementary particles are used. Since the early twentieth century, accelerators have been widely applied to physics research, and great progress in science and technology has been driven by the development of more and more powerful accelerators needed for fundamental physics research [1].Circular accelerators, and specifically colliders, occupy a special place [2, 3] among particle accelerator facilities. These innovative scientific tools allowed fundamental advances in scientific discoveries in high-energy physics. Collider technology and beam physics have advanced greatly, and modern facilities are now operating with energy and luminosity of several orders of magnitude higher than those of pioneer colliders in the early 1960s.Analysis of all Nobel Prize-winning physics research since 1939 [4] reveals that accelerators have played an integral role in influencing more than a quarter of physics prize recipients by either inspiring them or facilitating their research. Moreover, accelerators have contributed on average to one Nobel Prize in physics per three years [5], and four Nobel Prizes directly recognised breakthroughs in accelerator science and technology. Physics, however, is not the only domain of science to profit from the use of particle accelerators. Notably, synchrotron radiation sources based on accelerators have recently been instrumental in a number of Nobel Prize-winning research achievements in chemistry and biology. Nuclear physics is another field that has benefited from the progress made by particle accelerators [6].According to recent data [7], currently about 140 accelerators of all types are devoted to fundamental research, while in 2012 the