The Adams Institute's mission is to work with other national and international accelerator laboratories and institutes, to promote and develop accelerator science in the UK. The main objectives of the Institute are:
The next generation of particle physics needs the next generation of particle accelerators. The John Adams Institute is a UK and World leading research group dedicated to the research and development of particle accelerators.
Particle Accelerators are the huge machines that boost particles, the smallest components of nature, to speeds very close to the speed of light. Beams of these particles are collided, and in the wreckage new strange particles emerge. By looking at what new particles come out and how they come out, we can learn more about the structure of the universe itself.
Smaller particle accelerators also exist and these can have applications closer to home such as in Archeology, Zoology and Medicine. The Adams institute is developing accelerators for the treatment of cancers as part of the CONFORM project.
We are working on the International Linear Collider which will be a 40 kilometre long particle accelerator designed to compliment the information found by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN which is a circular collider.
Arguably the weirdest of all the particles we know about is the neutrino. Their mass so small that we don't have anything capable of measuring it's exact value. They are one of the most common particles that exist yet they hardly interact at all. In fact around 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second without you ever noticing. Neutrinos also pass straight through the earth without too much trouble as well!
To study neutrinos we need a machine to produce them. This is where the Neutrino Factory comes in. It will produce an intense beam of neutrinos targeted at detectors on the other side of the planet. How the neutrinos change from when they are fired to when they are detected will give us information about their makeup.
