Particle accelerators, as the name suggests, accelerate particles to ultra-high velocities in order to study high-energy collision processes. Because all energy in the collision can be converted to mass energy of other particles, new and exotic particles can be created by crashing the original particles together at higher energies. There are a variety of accelerator designs based on the size of the energies desired and the amount of space the experimenters have at their disposal. Accelerators may be either fixed-target, where the projectile particle is accelerated and its target is at rest with respect to the ground, or it may be a center-of-mass machine, which accelerates the two particles toward each other at the same time.

The simplest type of accelerator is the linear collider. The linear collider is a very long and straight pipe with an electric field pointed along the pipe. Charged particles, such...