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New Particle Collider Is One Foot Long

Posted by samzenpus on from the it's-not-the-size-of-the-collider-it's-the-speed-of-the-particles dept.

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."

3 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. It's been done...in 1959 by 602 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's a tabletop particle accelerator in Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column in 1959: http://www.sciencemadness.org/... And in the Sept 1953 issue, an account of some high school students in El Cerrito who built a cyclotron.

  2. Near the speed of light isn't hard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Your old desktop CRT would accelerate electrons to a reasonable fraction of c. A good accelerator will keep pushing the particles ever closer to the unobtainable speed of light so that they gain more and more mass. Physicists sometimes joke that their accelerators should really be called "ponderators".

    But, as others have already said, the summary sucks.

  3. Re:Not exactly by rgbatduke · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Besides, the invention of accelerators order of 12" in size is very, very old news. The Betatron:

    http://physics.illinois.edu/hi...

    is, as one can see, order of a foot in diameter and could produce electrons at order of 6 MeV in 1940. Yes, that is actually before the US entered WWII and long before the invention of the cyclotron. That is gamma ~12, or v ~ 0.997 c. So if the top presentation were at all relevant to TFA it would actually be boring. One might safely conclude that it is wrong and boring.

    The betatron was damn near the first particle accelerator truly worthy of the name, and was just about exactly 12" in diameter (a bit larger than that including the frame for the magnets etc) as one can clearly see in the second photo on this page if not the first.

    rgb

    --
    Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.