Question: have you ever used a shc? a super hadron collider?

Allan Pang answered on 28 Jun 2012:

I haven’t used the super large hadron collider for my research.

BUT I have used something similar to that. The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator. What it does is it uses an electromagnetic field to move charged particles to a very high speeds and these are contained in a beam.

One application of this is a synchrotron radiation. We use a particle accelerator to move X-ray beam to an extremely high speed and move around in a circular motion. Check out how the Diamond Light Source looks like in aerial view http://www.diamond.ac.uk/ (it’s a circular structure, right?) – You might also want to check out the cool image here: http://www.diamond.ac.uk/Home/About/Synchrotrons/Machine.html. So the beam starts to move in a circular motion first and then spread out to a “bigger circle”. In a bigger circle, that is where we do our experiment.

What we have is a protein crystal and we let this beam of X-ray shoot the crystal. Because the X-ray move in a very high speed and upon hitting the crystal, it scatters the beam. Imagine when you have a hose of water and spraying a wall, you begin with a beam of water but the wall scatters your beam of water. So, we use the scattered information (or we also called it as diffraction pattern – because the beam got diffracted), and use a complex mathematics (which currently can be easily be processed by computers) and turn them into a detailed atomic structure of a protein (The X-ray is powerful enough to hit the atoms and therefore, we know the location of each atoms in the protein).

Hope that explains a little bit of what I do!