Fixed Target Electron Accelerators

A tremendous amount of scientific insight has been garnered over the past half-century by using particle accelerators to study physical systems of sub-atomic dimensions. These giant instruments begin with particles at rest, then greatly increase their energy of motion, forming a narrow trajectory or beam of particles. In fixed-target accelerators, the particle beam impacts upon a stationary sample or target which contains or produces the sub-atomic system being studied. This is in distinction to colliders, where two beams are produced and are steered into each other so that their constituent particles can collide. The acceleration process always relies on the particle being accelerated having an electric charge; however, both the details of producing the beam and the classes of scientific investigations possible vary widely with the specific type of particle being accelerated. This article discusses fixed-target accelerators which produce beams of electrons, the lightest charged particle. As detailed in the report, the beam energy has a close connection with the size of the physical system studied. Here a useful unit of energy is a GeV, i.e., a giga electron-volt. (ne GeV, the energy an electron would have if accelerated through a billion volts, is equal to 1.6 x 10−1° joules.) To study systems on a distance scale much smaller than an atomic nucleus requires beam energies ranging from a few GeV up to hundreds of GeV and more.