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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."
Exactly! Just look at the powerful computers we have right now. We clearly shouldn't have wasted all the money on mechanical and tube computers and just waited until we got i7s. In fact, fuck it; let's stop all investment now and wait another fifty years when we'll have 512-core pocket computers.
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.