Researched
Particle Accelerators
Cockcroft and Walton (1932) split nuclei with artificially accelerated protons; Lawrence's cyclotron scales the idea up.
Open in the interactive tree →Instead of waiting for natural radioactivity, physicists built machines that speed up charged particles with electric fields. Cockcroft and Walton split lithium atoms in Cambridge in 1932, and Ernest Lawrence's cyclotron in Berkeley reached ever higher energies. Their descendants, from SLAC to CERN's 27-km LHC, found the quarks, the W and Z bosons and the Higgs boson, and the same technology makes medical isotopes and cancer-therapy beams.
Prerequisites
- Electromagnetism1831-1865
- Radioactivity1896
- Vacuum Tube (Triode)1906
Unlocks
- CERN1954
- Standard Model of Particles1973Quarks and the W and Z bosons were found in accelerator experiments
- Higgs Boson Discovered2012The Higgs boson was found with CERN's LHC proton accelerator