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JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago

> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?

Yes. SLAC has an excellent public-lecture series that touches on industrial uses of particle colliders [1].

If you want a concrete example, "four basic technologies have been developed to generate EUV light sources:" (1) synchrotron radiation, (2) discharge-produced plasma, (3) free-elecron lasers (FELs) and (4) laser-produced plasma [2]. Synchrotrons are circular colliders. FELs came out of linear colliders [3]. (China has them too [4].)

We have modern semiconductors because we built colliders.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M6sjEYCE2I&list=PLFDBBAE492...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S270947232...

[3] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...

gnufx an hour ago | parent [-]

In the context of the article "collider" means intersecting particle beams, like in RHIC and LHC, which obviously involves rather low probability interactions, as opposed to accelerators which slam a beam into a dense target (like the SLAC accelerator). In a synchrotron light source you want the beam to circulate and specifically not collide with anything; they were developed from particle physics accelerators, of course.