The engineering needed for particle physics

To be published soon. Lord Rutherford was the ‘god-father’ of accelerators; he challenged future generations of accelerator builders to invent reliable machines which could accelerate particles to higher and higher energies. In his inaugural presidential address to the Royal Society in London in 1928, he said ‘I have long hoped for a source of positive particles more energetic than those emitted from natural radioactive substances’. This was the start of a long quest for the production of high energy beams of particles in a very controlled way. Particle accelerators and detectors of today are among the most complicated and expensive scientific instruments ever built by mankind and they exploit every aspect of today’s cutting edge technologies and engineering. In many cases accelerator needs have been the driving force behind these new technologies; necessity being the mother of invention. In this paper I will try to give an overview of the engineering requirements for construction and operation of modern day accelerators. The subject is enormous so it is not possible in the limited time to go into any kind of detail. For this reason I will give reference to books and papers for further reading.