Can Scientists Create Focused Beams of Subatomic Particles?

[earamsey]

What kind of subatomic particle streams are scientists able to generate and how do they do it?

I know that LHC is banging together proton-protons streams and protons are large bulky particles and interested in finer grained particles. I am like asking if they can emit quark, gluon, boson, type particles and if so how what is required to create these type of subatomic particle emitters?

So far, accelerators pumps hugh amounts of energy and they get all kinds of stuff out. I wanted to generate a pure coherent one type of subatomic particle and at much much lower energies. Electrons emitters have limited application.

 

[EinsteinII]

Hi, Looks Humanino has posted an explanation for this in my topic "Can we see elementary particles?"

 

[jtbell]

I think accelerator experiments have used beams of just about any particle that lives long enough to produce a useful beam before decaying. I know of experiments using beams of electrons, positrons, protons, antiprotons, neutrons, pions, muons and neutrinos.

When I was in grad school about thirty years ago, one of my friends worked on an experiment that used beams of various short-lived hyperons, specifically sigmas and xi's, I think. These are rather short-lived when at rest, but when they move fast enough, relativistic time dilation extends their lifetimes enough to produce usable beams a few meters long.

Quarks are confined inside hadrons (protons, neutrons, etc.) so we can't make beams of them. Similarly for gluons. Under conditions we can produce, I think gluons appear only as virtual particles in strong interactions. W and Z bosons are too massive and difficult to produce as "real" particles so we can't get enough of them to make a beam. Of course, photons are bosons and we make beams of them all the time.