• Question: Has your research into new materials involved the CERN accelerators. If so, how?

    Asked by Anon to Paul on 5 Jan 2017.
    • Photo: Paul Shearing

      Paul Shearing answered on 5 Jan 2017:

      Hi – we don’t use CERN which is mostly used as a particle collider, we use other types of particle accelerators known as synchrotrons

      There are quite a few of these around the world, in the UK, the synchrotron facility is called Diamond. More info can be found here:

      http://www.diamond.ac.uk/Public.html

      It accelerates electrons to really high speeds, almost the speed of light – these accelerating electrons can be used to generate super high intensity X-rays, which we can then use for a range of experiments including super high speed imaging to see how batteries operate and fail

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