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3mm Inexpensive Chip Revolutionizes Electron Accelerators
AaronW writes "Scientists and engineers at the US DOE SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have developed an advanced accelerator technology smaller than a grain of rice. It is currently accelerating electrons at 300 million volts per meter with a goal of achieving 1 billion EV per meter. It could do in 100 feet what the SLAC linear accelerator does in two miles and could achieve a million more electron pulses per second. This could lead to more compact accelerators and X-ray devices."
Give me an efficient source of neutron flux and I can stop collecting smoke detectors. I'm kidding obviously, but if this is cheaper than collecting radium watch hands we may soon have more "Nuclear boy scouts" on our hands.
Unless you can somehow turn down the volume of the device, 300 Mev photons are high-power gamma rays, not x-rays. BTW unlike regular x-rays, at gamma energy levels you can actually activate matter, I.E. turn it radioactive.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=positron collider ghostbusters&source=video&cd=2&ved=0CEMQtwIwAQ&url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0u8rI0JvaM&ei=fRZJUvKgKrfH4APvooGYDg&usg=AFQjCNFd57Ln6LW63fkg_kMK4KrSvlN0qw&bvm=bv.53217764,d.dmg
so basically,
we should have waited before spending trillions on large colliders.
1 billion EV per meter is not going to cut it. Everyone knows you need 1.21 Gigawatts...
Those units don't even have the same dimension, how do you propose to compare them?
This is a reference to a movie called "Back to the Future"..
Finally we can build the fancy tiny guns depicted in MIB.
"Congrats soldier - at 100 feet this will fit in almost anything that floats or flies. Now weaponize it"
Don't mind him. He's still dazed from hitting his head on the toilet.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
This could lead to more compact accelerators and X-ray devices.
Just don't cross the streams. It would be bad.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Inquiring mind here, but are there any interesting gadgets or household revolutions that we foresee on the horizon, if this sort of tech is commonly available?
"3mm" ... nuf said
The US govt is interested in getting cheap proton therapy machines. Instead of cutting a human open with an expensive surgeon to remove a tumor, the computer controlled proton beam can blast through the skin, and strike the tumor. So yes, this is going to get lots of govt funding. Gains in particle accelerators are merely incidental.
Those units don't even have the same dimension, how do you propose to compare them?
1 Watt is a Joule per second. An eV is 1.6*10^-16 Joule. Now according to the theory of relativity, space and time are just different dimensions of the space time, therefore space units and time units are related. The factor is the light speed, 3*10^8 m/s, that is, a second is 3*10^8 meters, or a meter is 1/(3*10^8) seconds
Therefore 1 eV per meter is 1.6*10^-16 Joule * 3*10^8/second, or 4.8*10^-8 Joule/second. Now a Watt is 1 Joule/second, therefore 1 eV/m is 4.8*10^-8 Watt.
On the other hand, 1.21 Gigawatt are 1.21*10^9 Watt. Which is a factor of about 2.5*10^16. So still quite a way to go for time travel.
SCNR ;-)
And in order to not confuse anyone: the calculation above is of course meaningless because even though you can make the *units* the same using relativity, the *quantities* are still completely different; just like the torsional moment has the same unit as energy, but certainly is not the same as energy.
you misspelled "jigga"
We clearly shouldn't have wasted all the money on mechanical and tube computers and just waited until we got i7s.
We didn't. Early computers were funded from commercial sources not taxation, and they had practical applications right from the start.
Those units don't even have the same dimension, how do you propose to compare them?
Very carefully?
Ezekiel 23:20
No it can't. Stuff doesn't just become radioactive.
Someone ordered a particle beam weapon?
It's about time we had some more nuclear monst^H^H^H^H^H boy scouts! They used to call me mad, you know. And why? Because I dared to dream of my own race of atomic monsters, atomic supermen with octagonal shaped bodies that suck blood...
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> "This could lead to more compact accelerators and X-ray devices."
...and weapons.
Why spend 8 billion Euro on something that will be in every kid's room in 5 years? I fully expect "My First Large Hadron Collider" from Fisher Price in a few years so that kids can make their own micro-singularities and find out how meaningless the "God Particle" actually is for themselves.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
If these cold be produced in large quantities and were cheap enough, I wonder how well we could progress in the creation of antimatter. If we could do so, and could improve the penning trap so that the antimatter could be kept for a long time, then many problems with space travel would be solved.
yeah, it's 1/3 the size of a 9mm bullet.
When can I get one in my phone?
I read a PhD dissertation and was instructed by a professor working on the idea of using chanelling in crystal material to accelerate particles. What was not included then was the addition of lasers. That was the mid 1980s.
Linking answer.com as if it was the consensus ? No. No. 1000 time no. Gamma ray and xray are not differentiated by their origin but solely by their frequencies. The problem is that around 100 keV there is no "distinct " definition of what is xray and what is gamma (contrast to green which we set defined as 520â"570 nm). So depending on the context somebody may say gamma for a 100 keV photon, and in another context another person might speak of 100keV xray BUT ONLY in that circumstance. But at 200keV or 50keV the origin does not matter , the first will *always* be named gamma, the later xray.
is that the diameter, the radius or the length?
Yes, I know - made-up technobabble straight out of the sixties - but the FX were killer for the day, and I wants one. This looks like a fairly portable source of high energy plasma to me, a necessary first step. Not much of it, but we can work on that later.
At least, it won't scale in the way the article suggests.
It's possible that the tech involved might make for a more efficient acceleration mechanism than the current superconducting electromagnets, but I sincerely doubt it will lead to significantly smaller accelerators: accelerators are large not because it isn't possible to accelerate the electrons in a shorter distance, but because it's extremely inefficient to do so.
Large accelerators are limited by the fact that rapid accelerations of charged particles cause lots of radiation to be emitted. The amount of radiation emitted increases dramatically as the particles approach the speed of light, making it harder and harder to push the particles faster (or even just to keep them going at speed in a ring for circular accelerators). Even if this mechanism of electron acceleration is a hundred-fold more efficient energetically than the SLAC accelerator, it still couldn't accelerate electrons to SLAC speeds in 100 feet, because it would need vastly higher acceleration and that higher acceleration would lead to lots of radiation, limiting the pace of acceleration. Personally, I doubt it's 100 times more efficient. I bet most of that efficiency difference comes from this small device not operating on electrons moving anywhere near the speed of light.
How do they get 1 billion electric vehicles in a meter??
... I'm the operator of my pocket accelerator.
Opening the first link in a new tab led me to get redirected to http://a.ldowi.com/click/?s=108520&c=923468&subid=2, which seems to be a "MoboMarket.apk" file. Anyone else?
Not as meaningless as you think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt#Distance
Nope. People just mis-pronounce giga.
Look it up, we should be pronouncing gigabyte as "jiggabyte".
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!