New Particle Collider Is One Foot Long

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 5, 2014 @12:16PM 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."

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It's been done...in 1959 by 602 · 2014-11-05 12:42 · 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.