Particle accelerators in modern world

Abstract

At the present time, there are about 40 thousand particle accelerators in the world. The present review article describes their role in various realms of human activities, including industry, fundamental science, and medicine. Data presented in various sources, such as scientific articles and reports and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) publications, over the past fifty years are analyzed. Emphasis is placed on the importance of nuclear-physics methods for medicine.

The socio-economic impact of a breakthrough in the particle accelerators’ technology: A research agenda

“…The Delphi method involves multi-round forecasting challenges where experts provide initial forecasts and then adjust their initial guesses based on feedbacks they receive. 7 This process is iterated until a satisfactory level of consensus is reached and final forecasts are constructed from the aggregation of individual forecasts. See [10] for an application of the Delphi method to the design a technology roadmap.…”

“…6 See [39] for an alternative approach. 7 The Delphi method was developed at the RAND Corporation in the 1950's for predicting bombing requirements in a cold-war conflict with the USSR [12]. Surveys of the Delphi method are provided by [13], [36] and [37], while [29] review the judgmental forecasting approach.…”

“…Notes: authors' calculation based on data from Table 1 in [7]. Lines represent the cubic spline interpolation of the original data that are provided only for selected years denoted with symbols.…”

“…1 Similarly, new scenarios for industrial applications -such as ion implantation in the semiconductor industry -may lead to demand forecasts. As a preliminary step to extrapolate the future trajectories of the accelerator business, Figure 1 plots the data provided by [7] on the cumulated count of accelerators worldwide by field of application. As we can see, the average yearly growth rate is respectively 1%, 9%, 6% for science, medicine and industry, thus suggesting a great variability across fields of application.…”

Editorial: Applied Nuclear Physics at Accelerators

“…There are of course many kinds of accelerators that span a very wide range of energy and accelerate different types of particles. The number of particle accelerators in the world has increased rapidly in the past years, reaching a total number of about 40,000 excluding X-ray tubes and electron microscopes [3] (Figure 1). In spite of that, as shown in Figure 1, the number of large, high-energy accelerators in science has remained approximately constant in the twenty-first century.…”