What is an Atom Smasher?
“Atom smasher” is a colloquial term for a particle accelerator, a device that accelerates elementary particles (protons, electrons, and into each other at significant fractions of the speed of light to probe their inner makeup. Physicists have been building particle accelerators since 1931, when a 9-inch cyclotron atom smasher was built at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Particle accelerators are key tools used by physicists to probe the structure of space, time, and matter. Instead of exploring outer space like telescopes, particle accelerators explore the “inner space” of the atom. The latest and greatest atom smasher is the $5 billion US Dollars Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. This device, which is one of the most expensive and largest technological constructs ever built, lies in a tunnel 27 km (17 mi) in circumference, up to 175 m (570 ft) underground. It accelerates particles up to 99.9999991% of the