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The palladium that powers Tony Stark's arc reactorand, by extension, his Iron Man exoskeleton suitis slowly leaking into his bloodstream and killing him. And the fast-talking industrialist has exhausted the rest of your periodic table looking for an element that is a safer power source than palladium. Stark's only option is to create a new elementwhich he does by constructing a particle accelerator in his workshop out of some metal tubes. When he flips on the switch, two beams of light collide, creating a third beam that Stark steers (using a wrench, and with much destruction to the walls of his workshop) into a brand new arc reactor. (Check out the scene in the trailer, below, at around the 1:18 mark.) It all seems very easy, at least for someone like Tony Stark.
"Particle accelerators have been in the zeitgeist for a couple of years now because with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland," says Todd Satogata, a physicist in the Collider-Accelerator Department at Brookhaven National Labs. "There are good things and bad things about the portrayals of particle accelerators in media."
According to Satogata, particle accelerators are built to accelerate and collide neutrons, protons and other the subatomic particles at very high speeds. And while they are can create new elementsan event that occurs every 5 or 10 yearsit doesn't happen exactly as Iron Man 2 portrays it. "You smash the nuclei of particles together,
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Office 2010 Standard," Satogata says. "But it is really not really stable. Most from the new elements that get created like this last billionths of a second before they disintegrate." Because of this instability, it is very difficult to store elements as Stark does in his arc reactor: They need to get moving at nearly the speed of light.
But could someone establish a particle accelerator in his property (or tiny lab), like Tony Stark does? The answer might surprise you. "People have," Satogata says. "As a matter of fact, occasionally you get a really smart teenager building one." (Fun fact: The first particle accelerator, called a cyclotron, was 5 inches in diametersmall enough to hold.) You'd need a beam tube with a large vacuum, charged particles, magnets to bend the beam, and radio frequency oscillators, or RF cavities, to accelerate the particles. "For the types of things he's doing, he'd probably need much bigger magnetsI didn't even see any magnets," Satogata says. "So that's a little bit unrealistic unless he's got really, really strong magnets." There's nothing to accelerate the particles, either,
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Powering the accelerator, however, could possibly be an issue. 2.5 miles long, Brookhaven's superconducting collider needs 10 to 15 megawatts of powerenough for 10,000 or 15,
Purchase Windows 7,000 homes. "For Stark to run his accelerator, he's gotta make a deal with his power company or he's gotta have some sort of serious power plant in his backyard,
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But there are two things in the scene which have been crazy to Satogata: One, that Stark would just stand in the room with his accelerator and expose himself to massive amounts of radiation; and two, that the resulting elemental beam would only go in one direction. "When two automobiles crash into each other, do all the parts fly off to one side, or do they fly off to both sides?" He asks. "If stuff crashes head on, generally all the stuff that comes out does not all go off to one side. And in that scene, he had two beams colliding head on, where was all the beam coming out? One side. Conservation of momentum was violated. That's a big one. We have been comfortable with that for, oh, 400 years. If you had extra magnets around that beam to focus it, then I could believe it. But just a wrench ain't gonna do it. Sorry."