linguistic:voice_change, structural:expansion
History

Ernest Lawrence's first cyclotron was a mere 4 inches (100 mm) in diameter. Later, in 1939, he built a machine with a 60-inch diameter pole face, and planned one with a 184-inch diameter in 1942, which was, however, taken over for World War II -related work connected with uranium isotope separation; after the war it continued in service for research and medicine over many years.

The first large proton synchrotron was the Cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which accelerated protons to about 3 GeV (1953–1968). The Bevatron at Berkeley, completed in 1954, was specifically designed to accelerate protons to enough energy to create antiprotons, and verify the particle–antiparticle symmetry of nature, then only theorized. The Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) at Brookhaven (1960–) was the first large synchrotron with alternating gradient, " strong focusing " magnets, which greatly reduced the required aperture of the beam, and correspondingly the size and cost of the bending magnets. The Proton Synchrotron, built at CERN (1959–), was the first major European particle accelerator and generally similar to the AGS.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator, SLAC, became operational in 1966, accelerating electrons to 30 GeV in a 3 km long waveguide, buried in a tunnel and powered by hundreds of large klystrons. It is still the largest linear accelerator in existence, and has been upgraded with the addition of storage rings and an electron-positron collider facility. It is also an X-ray and UV synchrotron photon source.

The Fermilab Tevatron has a ring with a beam path of 4 miles (6.4 km). It has received several upgrades, and has functioned as a proton-antiproton collider until it was shut down due to budget cuts on September 30, 2011. The largest circular accelerator ever built was the LEP synchrotron at CERN with a circumference 26.6 kilometers, which was an electron/ positron collider. It achieved an energy of 209 GeV before it was dismantled in 2000 so that the tunnel could be used for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is a proton collider, and currently the world's largest and highest-energy accelerator, achieving 6.5 TeV energy per beam (13 TeV in total).

The aborted Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas would have had a circumference of 87 km. Construction was started in 1991, but abandoned in 1993. Very large circular accelerators are invariably built in tunnels a few metres wide to minimize the disruption and cost of building such a structure on the surface, and to provide shielding against intense secondary radiations that occur, which are extremely penetrating at high energies.

Current accelerators such as the Spallation Neutron Source, incorporate superconducting cryomodules. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and Large Hadron Collider also make use of superconducting magnets and RF cavity resonators to accelerate particles.