Introduction to Particle Accelerators (NPAP MOOC)

Welcome to the Nordic Particle Accelerator Program's (NPAP) Massive Open Online Courses and to the fascinating world of particle accelerators! Did you know that in the year of 2000 there were more than 15 000 particle accelerators in the world? Yet, today it has grown to more than 30 000 of them! A third of the particle accelerators are dedicated to medical applications, such as radio therapy, and a half are used for ion implantation in semiconductor devices. Also numerous particle accelerators are used for sterilizing food. Despite these everyday life examples of small particle accelerators, it is the large accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, that most people associate with particle accelerators. There will be many new applications for particle accelerators in the future and by that there is a need for MOOCs that describe the techniques and applications of these machines.. The NPAP series of MOOCs consists of three MOOCs designed to disseminate knowledge about particle accelerator technology to impacted fields. The courses have been made possible thanks to the support of the Erasmus Plus, Strategic Partnership funding of the European Commission and thanks to the dedicated lecturers from the universities of Lund, Uppsala, Arhus, Oslo and Jyväskylä, and by experts from the MAX IV Laboratory and European Spallation Source (ESS), both in Lund, Sweden. In many of the lectures we detail the MAX IV Laboratory and ESS - currently hosting the most powerful synchrotron light source and neutron source in the world. In the MAX IV Laboratory intense X-ray beams are produced by electrons that are first accelerated to almost the speed of light, and at ESS protons will be accelerated and, by a process called spallation, generate intense beams of neutron. The X-ray and neutron beams are used for looking into matter, down to the atomic level. The MAX IV Laboratory and ESS form a unique European center of excellence for thousands of scientists that together bui