I may be wrong, so don't quote me on this. From what I understood, you can shoot off small parts of atoms by colliding them against other atoms at a ridicilous high speed. However, to reach these ridiculous high speeds you need to accelerate atoms across very long distances. That's where the Large Hadron Collider is worth a mention, since they have infinitely long tubes (because they're circles). So they use that for quantum research that way. How they accelerate those atoms is beyond me, I'd rather leave that to the experts.
How late is it for you?