National Institute for Nuclear Physics
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PARTICLE ACCELERATORS

Particle accelerators are instruments that have played a very important role in physics (and not just physics) for a long time, both for fundamental research and for applications. Typically, these are complex structures that accelerate charged subatomic particles or ions at very high speeds, until they collide with each other or against a fixed target. They maybe linear or circular. In both cases, the acceleration of the particles occurs by applying an intense electric field, while in the case of circular accelerators, the particles are kept along a curved trajectory thanks to powerful magnetic fields.
The largest and most powerful accelerator ever is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN in Geneva.

The LHC accelerator at CERN (© CERN)
Some of the team members that realized AdA

The LHC is an underground ring that is 27 kilometres in circumference located in an area at the border between France and Switzerland. In particular, LHC exploits the acceleration and collision between very high energy protons. Its goal is to investigate the fundamental structure of matter and confirm the predictions of the standard model of elementary particles, as well as to look for traces of “new physics”. The discovery of the Higgs boson, which occurred at the LHC in 2012, is the last of the great discoveries obtained from particle accelerators in the field of research into fundamental physics. However, accelerators have long been used throughout the world in a large variety of applications. In the medical field, they are very important for treating tumours (in particular, in radiotherapy and hadrontherapy) and for producing isotopes, while in the industrial field they are used to sterilise health and food products and for ion implantation.
INFN has a long tradition in the field of particle accelerators, both within international collaborations (for example it has a front-line role in research underway at the LHC) and with important facilities operating in Italy.

In the second half of the 1950s, INFN designed and built the first Italian accelerator, the Electron Synchrotron, built in Frascati, where the Institute’s first National Laboratory was also founded. Thanks to the intuition of Bruno Touschek, the AdA was built in 1961 in Frascati. This was the first prototype ever created of an accelerator with electrons and positrons circulating in the same ring, a design that all the large circular accelerators built in subsequent years throughout the world derive from. The more notable recent facilities include: DAFNE, operating since 1999 at the National Laboratories of Frascati, which exploits collisions between electrons and positrons; the superconducting cyclotron that operated from 1994 to 2020 at the National Laboratories ofthe South, currently being upgraded; and the SPES cyclotron, installed in 2018 at the National Laboratories of Legnaro, which will also be used for medical applications.

Superconducting Cyclotron (CS) K800 at LNS
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