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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."
As I wrote, I had an inkling of what the article talked about; I still remember some of my College Physics (including some relativity, oddly enough). It's just that even by /. standards, the vocabulary content of the "article summary" was over the top.
I wasn't kidding about the audiophile comment... With high end entertainment centers advertising "fibre channels" and "DTS encoders" and other such junk only an electrician or a acoustic engineer can understand fully, there are times where information devolves into mere data. That's what this article submission succumbed to...
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Science an be good sometimes, but don't we have enough already?
So we shouldn't be working on accelerators that let us perform anti-cancer therapy more easily?
(I know, IHBT; this is just an exceptionally silly troll.)