 This is a pretty expensive way to accelerate particles though, particularly if you need to achieve high energies. So the biggest accelerators use a few tricks to pass particles through the same acceleration regions repeatedly. How do they do this? Well, let's have a look at the shape of an accelerator like the LHC. Basically, a portion of this ring is the accelerator equation. It can be concentrated in one area of the ring, or it can be interspaced throughout the ring. The beam of charge particles is kept in the ring via very strong magnets. So particles can repeatedly be passed through the accelerating region. When they have enough energy, those same accelerated particles can either be injected into bigger accelerator rings, again using magnetic fields to guide the particles, or eventually be transported to collision stations within VAS detectors where the outcomes of collisions can be observed. The key to this last bit, the collisions, is that particles can be accelerated in both directions in these rings since we can manipulate the fields in the accelerating sections. So we can keep accelerating both beams of particles until we're ready to initiate a collision. What you generally have is something like this. So you have your ring, you have two vacuum tubes in which the particles actually travel. Each of those vacuum tubes represents a direction for those particles. You'll then have a detector station where the two bunches of particles traveling in different directions can actually be collided together. This is made possible using not just the electromagnetic acceleration regions, but also a series of magnetic fields to guide the particles around the paths. At the LHC, particles can in principle be accelerated to energies up to 7 TeV. That's 7 trillion electron volts. This is possible because the LHC is the biggest and most technologically advanced ring in a series of accelerator rings at CERN. These two accelerated beams can be collided head-on in the LHC. That means reactions with a total of 14 TeV in the center of mass energy can, in principle, be studied.