A GIGANTIC electron gun resembling a television tube dozens of kilometres long could take particle physics to a new level and spell the end for some of today’s circular colliders.
Linear colliders, which accelerate particles in a straight line, fell out of favour several decades ago. The need to reach ever higher energies would have meant building unfeasibly long and expensive accelerators.
So physicists turned to circular accelerators such as the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider at CERN in Geneva, which has a circumference of 27 kilometres. These can accelerate particles to successively higher energies on each circuit.
But circular…
