Experimental laboratories

Experimental laboratories

In particle physics, the major international laboratories are:

• Brookhaven National Laboratory (Long Island, United States). Its main facility is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) which collides heavy ions such as gold ions and polarized protons. It is the world's first heavy ion collider, and the world's only polarized proton collider.
• Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (Novosibirsk, Russia)
• CERN, (Franco-Swiss border, near Geneva). Its main project is now the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which had its first beam circulation on 10 September 2008, and is now the world's most energetic collider of protons. It will also be the most energetic collider of heavy ions when it begins colliding lead ions in 2010. Earlier facilities include the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP), which was stopped in 2001 and then dismantled to give way for LHC; and the Super Proton Synchrotron, which is being reused as a pre-accelerator for LHC.
• DESY (Hamburg, Germany). Its main facility is the Hadron Elektron Ring Anlage (HERA), which collides electrons and positrons with protons.
• Fermilab, (Batavia, United States). Its main facility is the Tevatron, which collides protons and antiprotons and was the highest energy particle collider in the world until the Large Hadron Collider surpassed it on 29 November 2009.
• KEK, (Tsukuba, Japan). It is the home of a number of experiments such as the K2K experiment, a neutrino oscillation experiment and Belle, an experiment measuring the CP violation of B mesons.
• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (Menlo Park, United States). Its main facility is PEP-II, which collides electrons and positrons.

Many other particle accelerators exist.
The techniques required to do modern experimental particle physics are quite varied and complex, constituting a sub-specialty nearly completely distinct from the theoretical side of the field.