TABLE OF CONTENTS Accelerators are some of the most remarkable tools of modern science. They are precision instruments constructed on a gargantuan scale. They have to track and accelerate particles that traverse millions of km in just matters of seconds, and maneuver and constrain particle motion to accuracies of the order of 1 m. They can provide sufficient numbers of energetic particles to vaporize macroscopic targets with single pulses of beam. Because of their immensity and their challenging complexity, and because of their symbolic reflection of the intellectual aspirations and creativity of mankind, modern accelerators have been likened by Robert R.Wilson to the great Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe. Their impact on nuclear and particle physics, the fields for which they were initially developed, has, of course, been pivotal. They have served as the microscopes for probing nuclear and particle structure, and, in fact, were it not for the development of accelerators, the fields of nuclear and particle physics would still be in their infancies.
After the pioneering experiments of Rutherford and his colleagues revealed the presence of a nucleus within the atom, it became clear that higher-energy scattering experiments could provide an invaluable probe of the nucleus. For example, it was understood that with sufficient energy to penetrate the Coulomb barrier, projectiles could break apart nuclei and reveal their constituents. It was also recognized that the more energy a particle had, the more deeply it could probe within the nucleus. This is simply a consequence of the fact...
