A Radically New Particle Accelerator Could Have 500 Times the Power

If you know anything about the Large Hadron Collider , you cognize that it is huge . monumental . 17 miles of tunnels under Switzerland . Traditional accelerators involve all that space to get corpuscle to dash into each other at close to the speed of lighter . But scientists at Stanford have come one footstep nigher to a Modern type of corpuscle accelerator that could do the same at just a fraction of the size of it .

The key idea is plasm wakefield acceleration , and as the name implies , it ’s a bit like riding the wake behind a boat . Symmetry Magazine explains in particular :

investigator mail pairs of negatron bunches hold 5 billion to 6 billion electrons each into a laser - get column of plasma inside an oven of blistering lithium flatulence . The first bunch in each span blasted all the free negatron aside from the Li atoms , pass on the positively charged lithium core group behind — a form love as the “ blowout regime . ” The blasted electrons then fell back in behind the 2nd caboodle of negatron , forming a “ plasma backwash ” that impel the trailing clump to high energy .

The idea of particle wakefield acceleration has been bandied around for decades , but it ’s the first time scientists have achieved that “ gala affair regime ” and boosted particles to such gamy energies . To put some number on it , this give corpuscle 400 to 500 times as much energy as a traditional throttle would over the same distance .

The LHC is our most advance corpuscle catalyst yet , but eventually , we ’ll want more powerful accelerators tostudy particles big than the Higgsthat could be the source of dark matter . The size and cost of these accelerators , however , would be formidable . And CERN , which runs the LHC , has already uses enough electrical energy topower 300,000 homes . The potential solution would be to call back minuscule , think plasm wakefields . [ Symmetry , LiveScience , Nature ]

Top image via SLAC

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