Table-top Particle Accelerator Created

holy_calamity writes "French physicists have built a desktop particle accelerator. It uses a pair of laser beams to precisely control the acceleration of electrons within a plasma. It has the power of a device that usually takes up a whole room and could lead to new medical treatments. They don't mention the potential for experiments like 'what happens if I put my lunch in front of a 300 megaelectronvolt beam?'"

Comments

Eat Banana

[neurostar]

'what happens if I put my lunch in front of a 300 megaelectronvolt beam?'

Nothing you can see, because that's ~ 4e-11 J.

Chocolate bar

[coyote-san]

http://cultureofchemistry.blogspot.com/2005/11/rad ar-and-chocolate-bar.html

And don't use the term 'egghead'. It's origin is Nazi brown-shirts referring to how the skulls of intellectuals shatter when they hit the ground. (Or something equally violent.) We have enough anti-intellectualism in this country already.

Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

300 MeV may be 4e-11 J, but that's not the relevant figure. 300 MeV refers to the energy of a single electron in the beam. The beam itself, however, contains many, many electrons, not to mention the energy in the lasers and plasma producing the beam.

Re:They're not stupid

[darkonc]

A 300MEV beam signifies the energy of individual particles. Such a beam might have an very low intensity, or could be strong enough to be used as a weapon (that's a function of both wattage and diameter). A particle beam can cause either chemical or atomic changes in your lunch (i.e. it could conceivably make it radioactive).

A laser beam is only going to cook/burn your lunch.

Isn't that about the same a front beam laser?

Re:They're not stupid

[Sangui5]

When it hits the sandwich.