Question: In say thirty years, will particle accelerators be advanced enough to create a solid matter ?

Jemma Rowlandson answered on 23 Jun 2014:

Hi!

Very interesting question. In a particle accelerator you fire beams of protons or electrons at one another, and then essentially sit back and see what happens. The colliding beams at the moment can create new subatomic (smaller than an atom) particles, which scientist at places like CERN like to study for clues about how the universe began.

To make solid matter, well for a start you’d need to make bigger particles. This means the electrons or protons in the beam your firing would have to fuse. Nuclear fusion is what gives the Sun it’s power, it happens when two particles collide at high speed, joining together to create a new particle and giving off energy.

The problem is, in a particle accelerator an awful lot of the protons or electrons do not collide. They’re so small they just fly straight past each other. You have to circle the beams around for a while before a large number of particles actually collide, and this costs a lot of energy.

You could put a load more protons or electrons in your beam, but then they start to repel each other (as they don’t like being close) which creates a load more problems. So in thirty years no, I don’t think particle accelerators will be advanced enough to create solid matter, from subatomic particles like protons and electrons. That’s something for the scientists of the future to solve!