Luminosity Optimization
A collider is a particle accelerator whose main function is to smash (or collide) particles together. One famous collider is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I am currently doing my PhD work at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), but will not say anything too specific about the collider there (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC). Hopefully the concepts in this website will generalize to most other colliders/ high energy accelerators.
There are two main concepts that go into particle production in a collider. The first is Energy; the more energy the accelerated particles have, the higher the chances of discovery. The amount of energy that particles have in an accelerator depends on the amount of accelerating components, which ultimately comes down to costs. The second is Luminosity, or the rate at which collisions happen. The luminosity depends on both geometric effects of the bending magnets as well as collective beam effects. Both concepts are equally important for increasing the rate of discovery.
This section briefly goes into the topics of luminosity and optimization over geometric effects.