 In the last video, we ended with a potential method for producing the Higgs boson. In this video, we're going to talk about some of the technology that made this method possible. We'll start with charged particles. The reason for this is that charged particles interact with the electromagnetic force. Since we know how to produce and control electric and magnetic fields, we can use this knowledge to manipulate the particles we hope to accelerate. Let's start with a very simple example. Say we have two metal plates. The plates are very wide and closely spaced. Each plate is charged. One is positively charged and one is negatively charged. The charge on each plate is evenly distributed. You'll have an electric field between the two plates. The whole setup looks something like this. Let's say there's a tiny hole in the center of both plates. What happens if we inject a proton with positive charge through the hole in the left plate? Well, it's going to experience a force that pushes it towards the negative plate. That force is proportional to the strength of the electric field. Remember F equals MA? Well, as a result of that force, the proton will accelerate towards the negative plate straight towards the little exit hole we've installed. When it leaves the electric field region, it'll be traveling faster than it was when it first entered the field region. The voltage we use to create the electric field determines how fast that proton will be going when it leaves the electric field region. So the higher the voltage of our power source, the faster that proton will travel. If we use a one-volt power source to generate our electric field, the accelerated proton will have an energy of one electron volt and so on. So higher voltages allows to accelerate particles to higher energies. But there's a limit to how much voltage we can apply to a setup like this. So we need to use some other tricks to accelerate particles to very high energies. The first is simple. We have a series of identical plates all set up in a row. As the particle passes through each set of plates, it gains energy. The final amount of energy the particle has depends on how many identical sets of plates it needs to pass through. Now the technology we currently use to accelerate particles is a little more sophisticated than this. But the basic idea is the same. An electromagnetic field is used to apply force to charge particles repeatedly so they gain energy.