Particle accelerator

A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to nearly light speed and to contain them in well-defined beams. Large accelerators are best known for their use in particle physics as colliders (e.g. the LHC at CERN, RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Tevatron at Fermilab). Other kinds of particle accelerators are used in a large variety of applications, including particle therapy for oncological purposes, and as synchrotron light sources for the study of condensed matter physics. There are currently more than 30,000 accelerators in operation around the world.

There are two basic classes of accelerators: electrostatic and oscillating field accelerators. Electrostatic accelerators use static electric fields to accelerate particles. A small-scale example of this class is the cathode ray tube in an ordinary old television set. Other examples are the Cockcroft–Walton generator and the Van de Graaff generator. The achievable kinetic energy for particles in these devices is limited by electrical breakdown. Oscillating field accelerators, on the other hand, use radio frequency electromagnetic fields to accelerate particles, and circumvent the breakdown problem. This class, which was first developed in the 1920s, is the basis for all modern accelerator concepts and large-scale facilities.

SuperCollider

SuperCollider is an environment and programming language originally released in 1996 by James McCartney for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition.

Since then it has been evolving into a system used and further developed by both scientists and artists working with sound. It is an efficient and expressive dynamic programming language providing a framework for acoustic research, algorithmic music, and interactive programming.

Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License in 2002, SuperCollider is free software. The most recent major release (3.6.5) was released in November 2013.

Architecture

Starting with version 3, the SuperCollider environment has been split into two components: a server, scsynth; and a client, sclang. These components communicate using OSC (Open Sound Control).

SC Language combines the object oriented structure of Smalltalk and features from functional programming languages with a C family syntax.

The SC Server application supports a simple C plugin API making it easy to write efficient sound algorithms (unit generators), which can then be combined into graphs of calculations. Because all external control in the server happens via OSC, it is possible to use it with other languages or applications.

Supercollider (disambiguation)

A supercollider is a high energy particle accelerator.

Supercollider may also refer to:

Science

Music