1. accelerator centers worldwide
SLAC: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
FNAL: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
LEPP: Cornell Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics
BNL: Bookhaven National Laboratory
DESY: Deutsches Elektronensynchotron
CERN: Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire
PSI: Paul-Scherrer-Institut
LNF: Laboratori Nationali di Frascati
LNGS: Laboratori Nationali del Gran Sasso
BINP: Budker Instiute for Nuclear Physics
BEPC: Beijing Electron Positron Collider
KEK: Japanese accelerator center

2. the world’s largest accelerators
accelerated particles
Ebeam
start
luminosity
[ 1030 cm-2 s-1]
TEVATRON
p p
2 x 900 GeV
1987 25
PEP II
e+ e-
10.5 GeV
1999
5000
KEK B
13 000
HERA
p e±
GeV
1992 15
LHC
2 x 7000 GeV
2009
>10 000
Recent major colliders and their experiments:
TEVATRON collider (Fermilab, Chicago): proton/antiproton
Experiments: CDF and D : top quark found. At present, looking for the Higgs particle and physics beyond the Standard Model.
RHIC: Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, attempts to produce quark-gluon plasma (lumps of very “hot” matter in which quarks and gluons behave as free particles)
BELLE experiment at KEK B (KEK, Japan) / BABAR experiment at PEPII (Stanford, California, USA): electron/positron: CP-violation in B-meson decays
HERA (DESY, Hamburg, Germany): electron/proton: Strong interaction studies
LHC collider (CERN, Geneva): proton/proton and lead/lead
CMS and ATLAS experiments will be looking for the Higgs boson, Supersymmetry, and “new physics” (=beyong the Standard Model)
ALICE: investigate quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion (lead-lead) collisions
LHCb: CP-violation in B-meson decays

3. cross sections and rates
cross sections vary over
many orders of magnitude
inelastic: Hz
W -> ln: Hz
tt: Hz
Higgs (100 GeV): Hz
Higgs (600 GeV): Hz
required selectivity
1 :
trigger -

4. projectiles SPS and Fermilab used proton-antiproton collisions
LHC uses proton-proton collisions
why?

5. proton-antiproton proton-proton
what do “cross section” and “nb” mean?

6. how big is a proton? roughly 1 fm (10-15 m)
“femtometer” or “fermi”
1 barn is the area of a fm × 10 fm square
big unit
derived from uranium nucleus
physicists joked: “that cross section is as big as a barn”
proton-proton cross section at LHC energies: 70 mbarn
= 7 fm2
r ~ 1.5 fm
Size of a real “barn” (saray) in barns: 100 m2  10^2 * 10^28 = 10^30 barns
Size of Lake Baikal in barns: 3 * 10^4 * 10^6 * 10^28 = 3 * 10^38 barns

7. luminosity (instant) luminosity is rate per cross section
usual units: cm-2 s-1
e.g., 1030 cm-2 s-1 corresponds, for a reaction cross section of cm-2 ( = 1 μbarn), to a rate of 1 event per second
for a collider, the luminosity can be calculated as follows:
So, when building a collider, it is important to :
accelerate a large number of particles
make the beams in the interaction region very thin

8. integrated luminosity
number of events collected divided by the cross section
usual units: nb-1 (“inverse nanobarn”),
pb (“inverse picobarn”) etc.
an integrated luminosity of 1 fb-1 means that for a process with a cross section of 1 fb, 1 event (on average) should have been collected
or 1000 events for a cross section of 1 nb, etc.
so, 1 inverse femtobarn = 1000 inverse picobarns :
1 fb-1 = 1000 pb-1
physicists are now looking for very rare events, so it is vital to reach not only high energies (so that heavy particles can be produced) but also high luminosities
handling the resulting data rates is a challenge also for the detectors, trigger systems, and readout electronics
When looking at performance parameters of an accelerator, be careful to check if people are talking about instantaneous luminosity, or integrated luminosity to be collected over a certain period of time. These two values are correlated by the duty cycle of the accelerator, i.e. the time it is actually operating (“up-time”).

9. Instantaneous luminosity
Nearly all the parameters are variable (and not independent)
Number of bunches per beam kb
Number of particles per bunch 
Normalized emittance n
Relativistic factor (E/m0) 
Beta function at the IP  *
Crossing angle factor F
Full crossing angle c
Bunch length z
Transverse beam size at the IP *
Total Intensity
Beam Brightness
Energy
Interaction Region

10. LHC proton-proton circumference: 27 km bunches: 3564 + 3564
protons / bunch: 1011
beam energy: 2 x 3.5 (7) TeV
luminosity: cm-2s-1
bunch spacing: 25 ns
collision rate: Hz
dipole field: 8.4 T
number of dipoles: ~ 1200
heavy ions (Pb-Pb)
beam energy:
2.8 (5.5) TeV / nucleon pair
luminosity: 1027 cm-2s-1

12. how to hit a proton p ~ 1 fm beam ~ 10 - 100 μm = 1010 - 1011 fm
ratio of area: 1020
10-20 chance to hit one proton
1011 protons per beam
typical distance between protons: m = 100’000 fm
rate: × 1011 × = 102
nominal LHC: ~ 20 interactions per bunch crossing (“pileup”)
achieved now: ~ 8
Влади́мир Кла́вдиевич Арсе́ньев, Дерсу́ Узала́
film: by Akira Kurosawa
Siberia: (3000 km)^2 ~ 10^7 km2 = 10^13 m2

13. beam sizes around Atlas

14. In a large accelerator center such as Cern, acceleration of various kinds of particles (protons, antiprotons, ions, electrons, positrons) is achieved in several stages in specialized machines. Some of these accelerators are able to switch between different kinds of particles (so, SPS used to alternate every few seconds between the acceleration of protons for fixed-target experiments and pre-acceleration of electrons and positrons for the LEP collider).

15. layout of the LHC storage ring (built into the former LEP tunnel)

16. Modern accelerators need a lot of space and are therefore usually built under ground, such as the large accelerators at Cern, Geneva, Switzerland.
In the front one sees Geneva airoport, in the background the Jura mountains. The large circle shows the position of the underground LEP/LHC tunnel (circumference 27 km), the smaller circle shows the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) tunnel (circumference 5 km).
Why did you think it was built underground?

19. I don’t want to fall into a black hooooolee...  !!!
some (few) physicists believe that at LHC energies we could already produce “mini black holes”
they would disappear very quickly
but what if they don’t ?
could they engulf the Earth?
eat up Cern, Geneva, Switzerland, Europa ... and then Siberia and Lake Baikal with the nice seals  ??
are those scientists crazy ????
don’t worry, be happy!
there are convincing experimental arguments that we are safe

20. I don’t want to fall into a black hooooolee...  !!!
physicist: those black holes will evaporate much too quickly – we know that from calculations
concerned citizen: and what if those calculations are wrong (as usual)??
physicist: the Earth has been bombarded by cosmic rays of much higher energy for the last 5 billion years and we are still here!
concerned citizen: but maybe then they are so fast they just whiz through the Earth and have no chance to stop and grow?

21. I don’t want to fall into a black hooooolee...  !!!
physicist: at least some of them would be charged and would be slowed down by the Earth
concerned citizen: but maybe due to who knows why they are all neutral? Then they would fly through and we wouldn’t notice
physicist: through Earth, yes – but there are neutron stars and they are so dense that there the black holes would stop! And my astronomer friends tell me there are lots of neutron stars out there, so they (and we) are in no danger!
concerned citizen: you are right, Socrates!
oops ... the last answer must have crept in from one of Platon’s dialogues