Why don’t we build a particle accelerator orbiting the Sun?

Disclaimer: this is a blog post, not a paper. Seriously, I'm not suggesting to build such an accelerator, but I believe that by trying to answer this question the reader can learn something about the intriguing realm of accelerator physics. The Large Hadron Collider operating at CERN is the most powerful collider ever built by …

The LHC @ home: How to build an electromagnet

At the LHC, the main experiment at CERN, protons and other charged particles generated during collisions are deflected using powerful electromagnets. These magnets can yield enormous B fields of several Tesla. For comparison, Earth's magnetic field has a strenght of ~10^-4 T, a "natural" unit which is called Gauss after the guy who measured it …