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This one may sound a little naive, but I hope it is not thought inappropriate for this forum. The amount of energy required in an accelerator to speed an electron up to a sizable fraction of the speed of light is in the MeV range and bigger, more modern accelerators may even go up to the TeV range. One MeV, though, is only 1.602 x 10^-13 Joules, so 1 TeV = 1.602 x 10^-7 J. These seem like pretty small energies. Fermilab is about 4 miles around and uses about 50 MegaWatts a month! Why does it take such large, powerful machines to accelerate such light particles?
Thanks.
Thanks.