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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!
Egon Spengler would only say "Don't cross the streams".
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.
So, not everything is bigger in Texas.
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.
Well, a CRT accelerates electrons up to around 30 000 eV. This gets them up to 2 000 000 000 eV in roughly the same size, so I'd say it's a little more complicated than that.
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When we'll see one we can wear on our backs. ;)
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...
Yes, much like a CRT monitor, this and all other particle accelerators have the ability to generate mass.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
“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
Yeah... I think that would definitely be bad for your eyes if you watch too much.
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.
LOL ;)
Well then, you lucky man, there is probably only one thing to be done then, if you have the stones (and think you can avoid any possible drawbacks).
If you can cook at all, take a weekend cooking class with her sometime. It'll be a mutual activity you can share, you'll get time to spend with her, you might pick up something you can serve her on special occasions for breakfast in bed (for which you'll have the gratitude of a pretty woman), and her cream gravy might improve without you being the one that has to correct her. That could be a win : win : win. Maybe. LOL
Good luck!
my pop bottles and beer cans for Desk Top SUPER POWERS! ...and folks said desk tops were dead! ...slow news day.
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;)
Like my dad told me when I was a young rake, "That's why God made restaurants".
You can learn to cook, but you can't learn away ugly.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you Google "2 BeV accelerator," the first relevant hit is a scanned typewritten document [slashdot.org] from CERN.
Maybe because "BeV" is really antiquated and not too long after accelerators reached that energy level, GeV became standardized.
As far as use, there are some hard limits on current accelerator technology that requires them to be scaled up to make large gains in energy. The hope is that work like this will continue to go to higher energy levels and eventually allow for surpassing the highest energy accelerators without having to dig a large hole. Although that will be potentially quite difficult, as it is not as simple as just make a longer version of the new tech to increase the energy, so to some degree, the total energy they get is a lot more relevant than the energy per distance.
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
...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.
Eyes? A common CRT emits measurable levels of soft X-rays (shielded from you by the glass in the monitor). This would emit significant amounts of hard X-rays, not just bad for your eyes.
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