This introduction is largely taken with permission from Chapter 1 of the Ph.D. Dissertation of J. Graber, Cornell University, 1993. Alterations have been made to remove unnecessary references, or to update new information where we have obtained it. Introduction Advances in particle physics are inextricably linked to advances in particle accelerators.
Many parameters affect the performance of the accelerators, and the physics they make accessible.
A very important factor is the availability of higher energy particle beams, for higher energy beams allow for increasingly finer measurement of the fundamental nature of particles. The technology for accelerating particles is dependent on the type of particle being accelerated. The Tevatron, at Fermilab , and the the LHC, proposed for construction at CERN are examples of this type of machine. Electron positron colliders have been almost exclusively circular machines up to the present. The synchrotron radiation which results from accelerating charged particles in a circle makes circular machines impractical for further increase in energy.