What’s a Particle Accelerator Doing in a Hospital?

What’s a Particle Accelerator Doing in a Hospital?

What is a particle accelerator? It’s literally a method of taking a simple atom like hydrogen, but taking off the electron, so you just have one proton, and giving that proton energy of motion, giving it kinetic energy. The way to do that is you put it into a device which accelerates that proton to higher and higher velocity, and then you could either give that proton a boost of energy along the entire length of a straight line, or today, what we do, and a more common technique, is to put that proton in a ring, and each time that proton goes past a certain point, or various points, it gets a kick in energy, and they travel faster and faster and faster and so they accelerate to great velocities that way and then we smash them into a target and totally destroy them. We reserve the debris then from those collisions, and the pattern of the debris then tells us something about what kind of physics must have occurred at the point of collision. ( Source : https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/videos/1047-what-is-a-particle-accelerator )

Hospitals have all sorts of amazing tools, and some might even have a particle accelerator hiding somewhere in the basement.