system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
When new elements are created in the lab, why do we smash together individual atoms instead of just smashing two bigger clumps together?

Surely if our goals is to perform thousands and thousands of collisions, wouldn't it be easier to collide larger clumps of atoms than single atoms? Or is it something about the acceleration process that prevents us from doing that?
gpt
To reach the speeds at which collisions will cause the nuclei to interact, we have to ionize the atoms and accelerate them into a beam in a particle accelerator. There are many atoms in the beam - it's not as if we're performing the experiment one atom at a time - but the process of ionizing and accelerating breaks up any multi-atom clumps into a stream of separate ions.