In April 2015 the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, started operation once again after a 2-year upgrade. The collider is now able to accelerate particles up to energies of 7 TeV (7 × 1012eV). This means that streams of particles travelling in opposite directions collide with energies up to 14 TeV. These collisions can produce streams of short-lived particles that help physicists understand the nature of matter at the smallest scales.
The collision experiments at CERN and other laboratories are extremely sophisticated and energetic developments of a technique first used in 1909 by a team led by the New Zealand physicist, Ernest Rutherford. This question focuses on the results of this original scattering experiment originally published in 1913. In this experiment, alpha particles from a radium source were directed at a thin gold foil. Careful analysis of the manner in which the alpha particles were scattered from the foil helped develop a new, nuclear model of the atom.
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