Storage ring

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A storage ring is a type of circular particle accelerator in which a continuous or pulsed particle beam may be kept circulating, typically for many hours. Storage of a particular particle depends upon the mass, momentum, and usually the charge of the particle to be stored. Storage rings most commonly store electrons, positrons, or protons.^[1]

Storage rings are most often used to store electrons that radiate synchrotron radiation. Over 50 facilities based on electron storage rings exist and are used for a variety of studies in chemistry and biology. Storage rings can also be used to produce polarized high-energy electron beams through the Sokolov-Ternov effect. The best-known application of storage rings is their use in particle accelerators and in particle colliders, where two counter-rotating beams of stored particles are brought into collision at discrete locations. The resulting subatomic interactions are then studied in a surrounding particle detector. Examples of such facilities are LHC, LEP, PEP-II, KEKB, RHIC, Tevatron, and HERA.

A storage ring is a type of synchrotron. While a conventional synchrotron serves to accelerate particles from a low to a high energy state with the aid of radio-frequency accelerating cavities, a storage ring keeps particles stored at a constant energy and radio-frequency cavities are only used to replace energy lost through synchrotron radiation and other processes.

Gerard K. O'Neill proposed the use of storage rings as building blocks for a collider in 1956. A key benefit of storage rings in this context is that the storage ring can accumulate a high beam flux from an injection accelerator that achieves a much lower flux.^[2]