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Quine!
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So with my limited understanding of particle physics, I've gathered that the the jist of a collider is you accelerate (usually two) beams of charged particles towards each other so that they collide with the highest possible energy. The more energy you use, the more interesting your results will be, e.g. the lhc's 8 TeV collisions.
And now for an incredibly naive question:
What if you had a collider that, instead of colliding charged matter together, e.g. protons, you instead collided matter and anti-matter together. i.e. a proton beam on one track, and an anti-proton beam on the other.
I understand how this might not be technically feasible due to (1) The extremely volatility of anti-matter, what will all this matter around. and (2) The difficultly associated with producing anti-matter in any quantities whatsoever.
Lets not worry too much about (1), just keep people away from your collider, and since matter in particle accelerators is controlled using EM, you should be able to control a beam of, say, anti-protons using the same technique.
(2), however, seems like a deal breaker. I suppose if you were very efficient with your anti-protons (i.e., each anti-proton was likely to be involved in a collision), you could produce enough to do some physics.
That said, would your collisions be noticeably more energetic? If such a setup existed at the lhc, i guess both the anti-protons and protons in each beam would still only have energies of 4 TeV each? Would the explosive nature of anti-matter/matter collisions allow you to probe much smaller scales/higher energies? or would you just get a lot of photons?
And now for an incredibly naive question:
What if you had a collider that, instead of colliding charged matter together, e.g. protons, you instead collided matter and anti-matter together. i.e. a proton beam on one track, and an anti-proton beam on the other.
I understand how this might not be technically feasible due to (1) The extremely volatility of anti-matter, what will all this matter around. and (2) The difficultly associated with producing anti-matter in any quantities whatsoever.
Lets not worry too much about (1), just keep people away from your collider, and since matter in particle accelerators is controlled using EM, you should be able to control a beam of, say, anti-protons using the same technique.
(2), however, seems like a deal breaker. I suppose if you were very efficient with your anti-protons (i.e., each anti-proton was likely to be involved in a collision), you could produce enough to do some physics.
That said, would your collisions be noticeably more energetic? If such a setup existed at the lhc, i guess both the anti-protons and protons in each beam would still only have energies of 4 TeV each? Would the explosive nature of anti-matter/matter collisions allow you to probe much smaller scales/higher energies? or would you just get a lot of photons?