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Texas Physicists Create Tabletop Particle Accelerator
An anonymous reader sends this quote from a University of Texas news release:
"Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have built a tabletop particle accelerator that can generate energies and speeds previously reached only by major facilities that are hundreds of meters long and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build (abstract). 'We have accelerated about half a billion electrons to 2 gigaelectronvolts over a distance of about 1 inch,' said Mike Downer, professor of physics in the College of Natural Sciences. 'Until now that degree of energy and focus has required a conventional accelerator that stretches more than the length of two football fields. It’s a downsizing of a factor of approximately 10,000.' ... Downer said that the electrons from the current 2 GeV accelerator can be converted into “hard” X-rays as bright as those from large-scale facilities. He believes that with further refinement they could even drive an X-ray free electron laser, the brightest X-ray source currently available to science. A tabletop X-ray laser would be transformative for chemists and biologists, who could use the bright X-rays to study the molecular basis of matter and life with atomic precision, and femtosecond time resolution, without traveling to a large national facility."
now to make it back pack sized!
The Snotzogga.
Area needed for experimental appratus: One 6' folding table from Office Depot
Equipment needed: One petawatt-class laser, occupying a large portion of the physics building
A tabletop X-ray laser would be transformative for chemists and biologists, who could use the bright X-rays to study the molecular basis of matter and life with atomic precision, and femtosecond time resolution, without traveling to a large national facility."
And be labeled a terrorist as well!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXceYTu-UGQ
Not to cross the streams...until you have to cross them...
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Egon Spengler would only say "Don't cross the streams".
They built a tabletop CRT?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Think of all of the popcorn a Beowulf cluster of these could pop whilst emulating the Most High.
...is to shrink it down small enough to fit on a backpack, and use it to capture ghosts.
(don't cross the streams, though)
I don't believe this story at all.
Now, if the summary had said something about some high school kid doing it for the science fair for under $200, that I can believe.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
But can it create black holes which can engulf Earth?
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
So, not everything is bigger in Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_generator
New weapons??
Look at the article; the energy of the xrays is large, but there are a comparatively small number of them. It isn't a death ray.
(Now, the petawatt laser it needs as input may be more useful as a weapon, if the pulse is long enough. Energy is
power * time and if the time is femtoseconds, the energy is a yawn.
I won't be impressed until I can crank one out with my makerbot. I'd place it right next to my 3D printed M16.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Where do I sign up for the kit? Will it be a Kickstarter project? :)
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
We already have had fairly cheap "tabletop" (or small car-sized) accelerators for a long, long time. Accelerating electrons to 2GeV is not terribly complicated.
However, accelerating a LARGE number of electrons is complicated. Accelerating a large number of ions is even more so. That's why LHC is necessary - you can't hope get enough luminosity with small tools, even if you can reach the same energies.
this technique, IIRC, only applies to acceleration of electrons. The primary use, as the article states, will be as a light source for bio/chem/materials research such as takes place in NSLS at Brookhaven. Beam time is always over subscribed so I'm sure there will be demand for something like this though it would be nice to have a better idea of the costs - I'm not sure this means every lab gets one or there might be one shared by an entire university or research center.
Now my plan will finally come to fruition.
1. Buy nuclear accelerator
2. Create table-top doomsday device combining particle accelerator enhanced with a travesty generator in the kitchen
3. ???
4. Profit!!
I'll be rich in no time! Wait, wait . . . what if I could mount them on the heads of sharks? Ha ha ha ha! That is soooo sweet. I'll be far more powerful than those fools wasting their time with lasers. Lasers are for lusers. Bwa hahahaha!
Maybe I'll blow up the moon as a demonstration. Of course that might have the side effect of world peace. I'll have to use a different demonstration.
But still, I'll be rich!!!
When we'll see one we can wear on our backs. ;)
Yeah, transforms them from living human beings to a pile of ash :-)
If they can do this with an inch, imagine what one a mile wide could do. Sometimes I worry about how we can't find any evidence of other intelligent life in the universe but we see plenty of black holes...
“I don’t think a major breakthrough is required to get there,” he said. “If we can just keep the funding in place for the next few years, all of this is going to happen. Companies are now selling petawatt lasers commercially, and as we get better at doing this, companies will come into being to make 10 GeV accelerator modules. Then the end users, the chemists and biologists, will come in, and that will lead to more innovations and discoveries.”
1. Start with 1GeV research laser plasma accelerator
2. Demo 2GeV accelerator tied to one of the most powerful petawatt lasers in the world
3. Promise 10GeV if funding continues for next few years...
4. ???
5. Profit!
Will the team go for it and complete a cheddite projector?
J Williamson
The press release makes some very grand-sounding claims about replacing synchrotrons and free-electron lasers. I'm not an expert in the accelerator field but I've used these systems, and I have some idea of what the actual output needs to be in order to be useful for biologists. Specifically, it's not just the electron energies that matter, but the photon flux per unit of area. The figures for modern synchrotrons are on the order of 10^11 - 10^13 with a spot size of 100 microns or less - the very best will focus down to just a few microns. From what I can understand of the paper, they're talking about several orders of magnitude fewer photons over much larger areas. (If someone who understands this stuff better can confirm whether or not I'm reading it correctly, I'd be grateful.) The only hard free-electron laser in the US, the LCLS at Stanford, is orders of magnitude brighter than synchrotrons, and compressed into pulses on the order of tens of femtoseconds long.
It would be great if someone could build a high-intensity hard X-ray source at every big research university. But it's not the first time such claims have been made; there is (or was) a company called Lyncean that tried to build a tabletop synchrotron in the previous decade, and made similar predictions about its utility for biology. Their technology worked perfectly well from a theoretical standpoint - but it was several orders of magnitude too weak to be competitive with existing synchrotron beamlines, and too expensive to be competitive with existing laboratory X-ray sources.
(Of course this is pretty much standard stuff from university PR departments, which would always like you to believe that they're on the brink of curing caner or revolutionizing some widely used method. The actual Nature Communications article is much more sober.)
"Maybe now you'll think twice about sliming a guy with a positron collider on his back!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
my pop bottles and beer cans for Desk Top SUPER POWERS! ...and folks said desk tops were dead! ...slow news day.
I've grafted a particle accelerator to a shark!
off topic P.S. Being curious myself about how one might create an electron beam from the Van de Graaff, I consulted google and clicked on the first relevant looking link....
http://www.intelligentdesigntheory.info/electron-beam-van-de-graff-generator.html
The links from there are absolutely rich with incoherent babble... really good looking diagram photo. I like that all these crackpot inventions include a random magnet. You know its the real deal if it has magnets.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It's not the size of the laser. It's the motion of the particle acceleration;)
Two men were arrested in New York, on charges of attempted terrorism, for trying to get Jewish organizations to pay for an xray that would be mounted in a truck, aimed at Muslims, and used to make them sick or kill them.
The Jewish organizations turned them down, and contacted the FBI.
Unfortunately, there may be those who actually NEED to be charged with terrorism when dealing with Xrays like this.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
... it's not science.
...some things *aren't* bigger in Texas.
Wake me up when I can buy a Petawatt laser on a chip.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.