This is not rocket science but it is pretty close. Every day the accelerators running at Fermilab handle complex beam tuning, steering, and correcting quite routinely and with little fanfare. Tens of thousands of details about the particle beam and its position are checked, modified, and monitored in real time.
As the accelerator increases the energy of the beam, the beam becomes “relativistic”. As particles become relativistic, their speed changes little and they start gaining effective mass at a faster rate. Eventually the particles gain so much effective mass that at a certain point, an increase in energy does not significantly change how fast the particles travel around the accelerator. This is called the “transition energy” of the accelerator.
During transition, the controls of the accelerator must perform an intricate minuet to guide the particles. Large accelerators like the Tevatron choose not to handle transition; they leave it to their smaller cousins; the Booster and Main Injector. Dave McGinnis, a scientist in the Accelerator Division and one of the experts of the Fermilab accelerator complex explains transitions in this video clip.
