Laser Wakefield Particle Accelerator Realized

deglr6328 writes "Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's "l'OASIS" group have, for the first time, discovered a way to create high quality monochromatic beams of relativistic electrons using a 10 terawatt laser pulse focused on a specially formed plasma channel. The work is considered a landmark in new accelerator physics due to the fact that they are theoretically capable of creating extraordinarily high field accelerating gradients in the 100's of GeV per meter range; much higher than what's possible with the current gradients created by microwave frequency accelerators. The discovery could therefore open the door to far more efficient and compact staged particle accelerators utilizing next generation petawatt power lasers to achieve TeV scale particle energies and at lower energies, allow things like proton beam cancer therapy to be made affordable and widely available."

Comments

shouldnt we prevent cancer instead of curing it

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously, if you cut down on certain forms of polllution in this country it would stop a lot of cancer, if you reduced stress, provided more parks for exercise, etc etc etc, cancer would go down.

instead, you want to build a fancy toy to blast tumors. which incidentally is exactly how the manhattan project started out, at, funnily enough, lawrence's lab at berkeley, funnily enough, his wife wanting LLNR to change its name because he didnt want to become known as a 'bomb builder'.

the slashdot crowd is really truly ignorant of science. they are just children masquerading a technological fetish with the clothing of human progress.