Just a few hundred feet from where we are sitting is a large metal chamber devoid of air and draped with the wires needed to control the instruments inside. A beam of particles passes through the interior of the chamber silently at around half the speed of light until it smashes into a solid piece of material, resulting in a burst of rare isotopes.
Click here for original story, Powerful linear accelerator begins smashing atoms—how it could reveal rare forms of matter
Source: Phys.org