New Particle Collider Is One Foot Long

Jason Koebler writes The CERN particle collider is 17 miles long. China just announced a supercollider that is supposed to be roughly 49 miles long. The United States' new particle collider is just under 12 inches long. What the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's new collider lacks in size, it makes up for by using plasma to accelerate particles more than 500 times faster than traditional methods. In a recent test published in Nature, Michael Litos and his team were able to accelerate bunches of electrons to near the speed of light within the tiny chamber."

Comments

so size DOESN'T matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm so confused.

Re:so size DOESN'T matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, only how hard you thrust particles.

Re:so size DOESN'T matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Republicans took control of the Senate just yesterday, and we are already seeing results. American capitalism and Yankee ingenuity has beaten those big government and high tax liberal Europeans. This would have never happened if Harry Reid was still in charge.

Re:so size DOESN'T matter?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Obama to SLAC's creators: "You didn't build that."

Re:so size DOESN'T matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

George W. made some huge contributions to particle physics during his presidency:

President Bush met with members of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory research team Monday to discuss a mathematical error he recently discovered in the famed laboratory's "Improved Determination Of Tau Lepton Paths From Inclusive Semileptonic B-Meson Decays" report.

Bush shows Fermilab scientists where they went wrong in their calculations.

"I'm somewhat out of my depth here," said Bush, a longtime Fermilab follower who describes himself as "something of an armchair physicist." "But it seems to me that, when reducing the perturbative uncertainty in the determination of Vub from semileptonic Beta decays, one must calculate the rate of Beta events with a standard dilepton invariant mass at a subleading order in the hybrid expansion. The Fermilab folks' error, as I see it, was omitting that easily overlooked mathematical transformation and, therefore, acquiring incorrectly re-summed logarithmic corrections for the b-quark mass. Obviously, such a miscalculation will result in a precision of less than 25 percent in predicting the resulting path of the tau lepton once the value for any given decaying tau neutrino is determined."

The Bush correction makes it possible for scientists to further study the tau lepton, a subatomic particle formed by the collision of a tau neutrino and an atomic nucleus.

Bush resisted criticizing the Fermilab scientists responsible for the error, saying it was "actually quite small" and that "anyone could have made the mistake."

"High-energy physics is a complex and demanding field, and even top scientists drop a decimal point or two every now and then," Bush said. "Also, I might hasten to add that what I pointed out was more a correction of method than of mathematics. Experimental results on the Tevatron accelerator would have exposed the error in time, anyway."

Fermilab director Michael Witherell said the president was being too modest "by an order of magnitude."

"In addition to gently reminding us that even the best minds in the country are occasionally fallible, President Bush has saved his nation a few million dollars," Witherell said. "We would have made four or five runs on the particle accelerator with faulty data before figuring out what was wrong. But, thanks to Mr. Bush, we're back on track."

"It's true, I dabbled in the higher maths during my Yale days," said Bush, who spent three semesters as an assistant to Drs. Kasha and Slaughter at Yale's renowned Sloane High-Energy Physics Lab. "But I didn't have the true gift for what Gauss called 'the musical language in which is spoken the very universe.' If I have any gift at all, it's my instinct for process and order."

Continued Bush: "As much as I enjoyed studying physics at Yale, by my junior year it became apparent that I could far better serve humanity through a career in statecraft."

While he says he is "flattered and honored" by the tau-neutrino research team's request that he review all subsequent Fermilab publications on lepton-path determination, Bush graciously declined the "signal honor."

"This sort of thing is best left to the likes of [Thomas] Becher and [Matthias] Neubert, not a dilettante such as myself," Bush said. "I just happened to have some time on the plane coming back from the European G8 summit, decided to catch up on some reading, and spotted one rather small logarithmic branching-ratio misstep in an otherwise flawless piece of scientific scholarship. Anyone could have done the same."

Re:Compensating, again

[budgenator]

It may only be 12 inches long, but it's 1.5 MeV around!

Re:SLAC FACET accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

So is this possibly an ion drive, adaptable to spacecraft?

Re:Not exactly

[deviated_prevert]

If you do a Google search on

SLAC PUB plasma wakefield
you will find a lot of non-paywalled papers on this and related plasma accelerator experiments at SLAC.

And if you use BSD or Slac you will not have to deal with a the over sized POS systemd configuration to accelerate your bits for packet collisions!

Re:A man walks into a bar...

[ClickOnThis]

Two fermions walk into a bar. One says "I'll have a beer." The other says "I'll have what he's having."

Re:CERN 17 miles long ...

[Chrisq]

The Famous LHC is a ring and is 27 km "long" but since it is a ring it is basically infinite ....

If only that worked for doughnuts