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The tube isn't just to provide a vacuum; it's there to provide continuous acceleration of the particles while keeping the charged particles in the particle beam

The tube isn't just to provide a vacuum; it's there to provide continuous acceleration of the particles while keeping the charged particles in the particle beam from dispersing. There's another issue though. The reason that accelerators are circular is so that you can keep applying an electric field to accelerate the particles. The catch is, that when you accelerate a charged particle, it emits a bit of radiation, and this radiation increases with the amout of acceleration it's undergoing. The problem is that while you can keep nudging the particles faster and faster tangentially to the track, the circular track requires you to increasingly pull the particles back to the center of the track (i.e. apply a greater centripetal force). This means that you increasingly lose energy what is called 'synchrotron radiation'. This means that you have a maximum speed (or energy) that you can accelerate particles to with a given radius. Hence if you want more energetic particles in your collisions, you need bigger colliders. So if you had just a bunch of point to point satellites, you'd lose the benefit of having a greater radius (which doesn't actually apply anymore because you're not doing continuous acceleration anyhow), because you have to increase the amount of acceleration you have to apply at each satellite to pass it to the next one. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Particles/synchrotron.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Particles/synchro...

wincy 8y ago
What if we just built a really long, straight particle accelerator in space, and we just shot all our highly accelerated particles outside of the solar system? Aside from really ruining someone aliens day in a billion years, what’s the disadvantage of doing this?
- archgoon 8y ago
  That's a linear accelerator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_particle_accelerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_particle_accelerator Presumably, you want to actually see the results of your collision.
- davrosthedalek 8y ago
  The nice thing about rings or other methods like racetracks etc is that the particles come around and go through the same accelerator structure multiple times. Secondly, if you want to collide two beams, the advantage of a ring is that each particle has multiple chances of scattering of the other beam, as it "comes around" to the intersection region millions of times. That being said, linear accelerators are a thing, as they have other advantages.

wincy 8y ago

What if we just built a really long, straight particle accelerator in space, and we just shot all our highly accelerated particles outside of the solar system? Aside from really ruining someone aliens day in a billion years, what’s the disadvantage of doing this?

archgoon 8y ago
That's a linear accelerator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_particle_accelerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_particle_accelerator Presumably, you want to actually see the results of your collision.
davrosthedalek 8y ago
The nice thing about rings or other methods like racetracks etc is that the particles come around and go through the same accelerator structure multiple times. Secondly, if you want to collide two beams, the advantage of a ring is that each particle has multiple chances of scattering of the other beam, as it "comes around" to the intersection region millions of times. That being said, linear accelerators are a thing, as they have other advantages.