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However, these machines have advantages such as lower cost, the ability to produce continuous beams and higher beam currents that make them useful to industry, so they are by far the most widely used particle accelerators. They are used in industrial irradiating applications such as plastic [[shrink wrap]] production, high power [[X-ray machine]]s, [[radiation therapy]] in medicine, [[radioisotope]] production, [[ion implanter]]s in semiconductor production, and sterilization. Many universities worldwide have electrostatic accelerators for research purposes. More powerful accelerators usually incorporate an electrostatic machine as their first stage, to accelerate particles to a high enough velocity to inject into the main accelerator.
Electrostatic accelerators are occasionally confused with [[linear accelerator]]s (linacs) simply because they both accelerate particles in a straight line. The difference between them is that an electrostatic accelerator accelerates a charged particle by passing it through a single DC potential difference between two electrodes, while a linear accelerator accelerates a particle by passing it successively through multiple voltage drops created between multiple accelerating electrodes with an oscillating voltage.
== Details ==
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