The History of the Particle Accelerator

In 1936 researchers at Caltech found a particle that they dubbed a muon. Muons were short-lived and created when high-energy cosmic rays from space collided with other particles in the atmosphere. The first particle accelerator for scientific use was built in 1930 before the discovery of the muon. By the 1990s, the largest particle accelerator in the world was the Tevatron outside of Chicago,. It had a circumference of 6.3 kilometers and could accelerate particles to 900 billion electron volts. But there was a need for even larger particle accelerators, but at this scale you entered the realm of extremely big science projects that could only be funded by governments. SSC would have been the biggest

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