Accelerators – the speedy science

STFC leads the way in delving deep into the world around us, and in the case of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this is literal as well as metaphorical! Built 100m beneath the countryside of Geneva in Switzerland, the LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. This 27km ring of superconducting magnets accelerates two beams of particles until they almost reach the speed of light, before smashing them together with incredible force. These collisions break the particles up into their smallest parts, and give us an amazing insight into the building blocks of the world around us.

But did you know that this exciting science is also happening much closer to home? There are particle accelerators at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford, and the Daresbury Laboratory in Warrington. These accelerators are assisting in solving some of the major challenges of the modern world, including developing more effective drugs and designing more efficient solar cells.