LEP's copper cavities
22 September 1999
Looking rather as if surrounded by a collection of huge ornate urns, a technician surveys copper accelerating cavities from the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN. The acceleration in LEP comes when the electrons (and positrons) gain energy from electric fields oscillating at radio frequencies in "resonant cavities", rather like sound waves in organ pipes. In its first six years of operation a total of 128 copper cavities provided the energy. Since 1996, LEP has run at higher energies, reaching 200 GeV (giga electronvolts) at the beginning of August 1999. This has been possible as the orginal copper cavities have been gradually replaced with more efficient superconducting cavities.
Credit: CERN Photo
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