Topic: SCIENCE - on July 4, 2016 at 10:58:00 AM CEST
Listen to the LHC’s Weird, Whale-Like Sounds
From their humble beginnings in a canister of hydrogen gas, stripped of their companion electrons and directed through a series of smaller accelerators, batches of protons (about 30 centimeters long and a few hundred micrometers thick) pick up energy in stages until they are ready to be injected into the Collider ring. It is impossible, though, to create a constant electric field strong enough, over enough of a distance, to get these charged particles anywhere near the speed required for the Collider’s experiments. Instead, the Collider uses so-called radio frequency cavities, eight of them for each beam going in opposite directions, spaced regularly around the ring. Inside them, an electric field oscillates back and forth, resonating at very high (radio) frequencies.
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