Fascinating discoveries

The first particle accelerators were built in the 1920s and 1930s. Their primary purpose was to investigate the structure of matter. Physicists want to find out, with the help of particle accelerators, "what holds the world together at its core." For this, charged particles (electrons, ions, or protons) are accelerated. By bombarding matter with these particles, one can understand its structure. Nowadays, particle accelerators exist in all possible sizes (from a few centimeters up to several tens of kilometers, linear or circular). The Deutsches Elektronensynchrotron (DESY) is one of the world's leading accelerator centers, and DESY's large accelerator X-ray sources are internationally sought after for a wide range of applications: PETRA III is one of the world's best storage ring for producing X-rays. FLASH delivers ultra-short pulses of "soft" X-rays and enables unique experiments. And the European XFEL, with its 3.4 km, is the longest linear electron accelerator, producing the most intense X-ray pulses ever. More information is available on the DESY homepage.

Since their invention, particle accelerators have had a profound impact on the advancement of human knowledge through their groundbreaking scientific discoveries. A prominent example is the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in 2012; the empirical evidence for the existence of the Higgs field provided a fundamental component of the Standard Model of particle physics and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Accelerators are indispensable not only for particle physics but also find applications in many other fields of science and technology, such as X-ray imaging, spectroscopy, and the study of ultrafast processes at atomic and molecular levels. A recent prominent example is coronavirus research: X-ray sources like those at DESY were perfect tools to investigate the structure, dynamics, and function of SARS-CoV-2, aiding in the development of both drugs and vaccines against COVID-19.