Particle physics

Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the elementary constituents of matter and radiation, and the interactions between them. It is also called high energy physics, because many elementary particles do not occur under normal circumstances in nature, but can be created and detected during energetic collisions of other particles, as is done in particle accelerators.

Experimental particle physics

In particle physics, the major international collaborations are:

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• Brookhaven National Laboratory, located on Long Island, USA. Its main facility is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliderwhich collides heavy ions such as gold ions (it is the first heavy ion collider) and protons.
• Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (Novosibirsk, Russia)
• CERN, located on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. Its main project is now LHC, or the Large Hadron Collider, which is currently under construction. The LHC will be in operation in 2007 and will be the world's most energetic collider up to now. Earlier facilities include LEP, the Large Electron Positron collider, which was stopped in 2001 and which is now dismantled to give way for LHC; and SPS, or the Super Proton Synchrotron.
• DESY, located in Hamburg, Germany. Its main facility is HERA, which collides electrons or positrons and protons.
• KEK The High Energy Accelerator Research Organization of Japan located in Tsukuba, Japan. It is the home of a number of interesting experiments such as K2K, a neutrino oscillation experiment and Belle, an experiment measuring the CP-symmetry violation in the B-meson.
• SLAC, located near Palo Alto, USA. Its main facility is PEP-II, which collides electrons and positrons.
• Fermilab, located near Chicago, USA. Its main facility is the Tevatron, which collides protons and antiprotons.

Many other particle accelerators exist.

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The techniques required to do modern experimental particle physics are quite varied and complex, constituting a subspecialty nearly completely distinct from the theoretical side of the field. See :Category:Experimental particle physics concepts for a partial list of the ideas required for such experiments.

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