ABSTRACT
This chapter motivates the quest to ever higher beam energies and follows the development of accelerators from the cathode-ray tube and Rutherford’s early scattering experiments with radioactive samples to modern accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider as well as modern synchrotron light sources and free-electron lasers. The history of electron accelerators and of proton or other hadron accelerators is covered and decisive developments are high-lighted. Finally, a brief road map of the remainder of the book is given. A number of exercises, intended to stimulate further study, complete each chapter.
