The BATTERY POWERED TEVATRON

Let's build it from Energizer® Miniature batteries

These lithium cells are 3 volt batteries.   So to make 10¹² eV we need 10¹²/3 or about 333 billion of them! 

Solder them end to end in a LONG chain.  They are 3 mm thick.  So the total length of the Battery Tevatron would 10¹² mm or one million km!!  The circumference of the earth at the equator is 40,000 km and the distance from the earth to the sun is 150 million km.  

How much would the batteries cost?  At retail they cost $1.29 each, so even in quantity the cost is hundreds of billions of dollars.

The point of this little exercise is that Accelerator Design and Construction is strongly driven by engineering and economic considerations.   There is no physics reason which rules out a Battery Tevatron.  But it is clearly unfeasible to build such a machine.

rev.  E.M.  August 8, 2000