From Radioactive Decay to Accelerators and Colliders

Currrent accelerators have increased energies per beam particle to about 100,000 time that available in radioactive decays. Since electrical forces are used to accelerate beam particles, the particles must be electrically charged. In practice, the beam particles are either electrons or protons, or their anti-particles, positrons or antiprotons.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will accelerate two counter-rotating beams of protons to energies of 7 TeV, about a million times larger than the energies of radioactive decay. The goal will be to have protons from one beam collide with protons from the other, hence the name "Collider".