Graphite & particle accelerators
Client: Paul Scherrer Institute PSI
Magazine: 5232 — The magazine of the Paul Scherrer Institute
Issue 3/2022
Honeycombs for writing and acceleration
The “Daily Life & Research” section of the PSI magazine this time focused on the topic of graphite and its various fields of application. In everyday life, we typically encounter graphite in the form of a pencil. Its honeycomb structure, built up in slices, makes it possible to write with it. But graphite also plays a role in research in many ways. So, a special particle accelerator was built from it at PSI, which, among other things, makes it possible to measure the atomic radii of hydrogen and helium with unprecedented accuracy. To illustrate these two aspects, I had a pencil write the molecular structure of graphite and also recreated the aforementioned particle accelerator in 3D and shot particles through it.
