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New Accelerator Technique Doubles Particle Energy
ZonkerWilliam writes "Plasma wake particle accelerators are making surprisingly quick advances. It was a just a little while ago we had GeV acceleration in 3cm. Now they are capable of doubling the energy of electrons. 'Imagine a car that accelerates from zero to sixty in 250 feet, and then rockets to 120 miles per hour in just one more inch. That's essentially what a collaboration of accelerator physicists has accomplished, using electrons for their race cars and plasma for the afterburners. Because electrons already travel at near light's speed in an accelerator, the physicists actually doubled the energy of the electrons, not their speed.'"
Well, you're right when you don't account for relativity. When you're going at .99c and you double your energy, you don't start going at 1.4c.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Cue people who pretend they understand the science...
As mentioned, there are some of us around here who are actual scientists. However, there are no details in the article, thus no science to understand. All I found were crappy analogies with afterburners and some hand-wavey crap about plasma. I'm pretty sure that if it were as easy as running some crap through a plasma to accelerate it, it would have been done some time ago. And there are a number of pertinent questions:
Why do they have to use a 2-mile accelerator if the plasma can do in a foot what it takes the 2 miles to do?
Why can't it be longer?
How is the plasma chamber set up? I'm guessing it's probably an coupled with an RF field, which can accelerate a plasma, but details, come on!