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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."
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.
1 billion EV per meter is not going to cut it. Everyone knows you need 1.21 Gigawatts...
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 this rate, in 50 years we'll be carrying them around and debating if personal linear-accelerator-guns are covered under the 2nd amendment.
This is a reference to a movie called "Back to the Future"..
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?
These new devices only accelerate electrons. For high energy physics research other particles need to be accelerated and collided, e,g, hadrons (hence the name Large Hadron Collider) It's unclear if the same tech can be used for other particles. Rubbish TFA.
assignment != equality != identity
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.
Aside from the relative difficulty shielding yourself from an electron beam with smoke. And the fact that electron beams won't blind everyone on the city block when the first trigger is pulled. And the fact that electron beams of sufficient charge look like lightning bolts
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
Ignoring the rest of the URL, which clearly does not point to a .dmg file, just about everyone can safely "click" links that end in .dmg as a dramatic majority of users do not own a Mac.
Further, why would the few Macs users, having downloaded such a file, blindly execute its contents?
Really, the only people who could possibly be in danger from such a link would necessarily be both a Mac users and unimaginably incompetent.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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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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.
On the plus side, not all neutron generators are polite enough to stop generating when you cut the power, so it might be an improvement.
Riiiiiight, because anyone in their right mind is gonna click a random link ending in .dmg... Aka, a Mac disk image file, commonly used for distributing software.
Hey, if you think that it's diseased, don't mount it. Did you skip sex ed or something?
At this rate, in 50 years we'll be carrying them around and debating if personal linear-accelerator-guns are covered under the 2nd amendment.
"The only way to stop a bad guy with a linear accelerator is a good guy with a linear accelerator. Or, um, a layer of lead, DU, tungsten, or some other fairly dense material, of appropriate thickness. Wait, did I mention lead? Where was I?"
If you read the article, you'll realize that there is a separate laser accelerator necessary BEFORE this chip, and then a second high-power IR laser necessary to drive the chip.
More-or-less, they've increased the efficiency of laser-based electron acceleration. Good on them, but the solution isn't, as the summary suggests by omission, just a small chip alone and nothing else.
More importantly for the parent (I know, I know, don't feed the trolls), the presented accelerator only accelerates electrons, and is intended as a gamma and x-ray source. That's very different from accelerating electrons and positrons to nearly the speed of light, or protons, or atomic nuclei, etc. To do high-energy physics, you need big, big accelerators. The device to accelerate a single subatomic particle to levels where it carries as much energy as a brick dropped on your foot, isn't going to be a crystal a few millimeters on a side.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
> "This could lead to more compact accelerators and X-ray devices."
...and weapons.
Have you really never dissected a google url before??? This person clearly searched for "positron collider ghostbusters" and pasted the YouTube link that came up in the search results.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Well, the path of least resistance to ground is probably going to be the person holding the pocket lightning gun which will severely limit the number of people who would be willing to pull the trigger.
It would be an awesome way to commit suicide, however, and I'm sure all the bystanders would be suitably impressed by the light show if you did it at night.
And my captcha for this post is 'physics'... how appropriate.
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.
Actually yes. Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize winning experimentalist argued extensively that large grants make experimentalists lazy. He joked that Michelson-Morley today would be done by launching antipodal satellites with expensive laser alignment hardware at the very low cost of $300 million.
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.
Or distance.
The inverse square law provides the best shielding.
Not a sentence!
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.
Wikipedia agrees that the distinction is usually made on source as opposed to energy, and points out that how it's done depends on the field of study (for example, in astronomy it's made based on energy since the source may be uncertain). Personally I think it should always be done based on energy alone and that these different fields should standardize on that.
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?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0u8rI0JvaM
The only part of the above link that matters.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Not as meaningless as you think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt#Distance
It is standard - it's based on the source. And that's a useful distinction, far more so than the energy.
You said it yourself - astronomers may differentiate based on energy simply because they don't know the source, so they have to assume it. If they know the source, or have a good reason to think it's something in particular, they use the standard terminology.
Or a dense material like... air. A sheet of paper works quite well too.
Not quite. While one or a few of these chips might make a nice small source of x-rays or electron beams they are certainly interested in putting a bunch of them together to make high energy physics linear electron accelerators (thus the comparison to SLAC). It would still be big, but since these things are more efficient than the microwave acceleration normal linear accelerators use, you could build a smaller one that achieved the same energy. Or a same size or bigger one that achieved higher energies.
This is timely: the next generation of electron accelerators is being discussed currently in high energy physics circles, designed to follow up on the discoveries made at the LHC.
Incidentally, this technique was covered on Slashdot a few years ago when it was just a proof of principle.
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!