Berkeley Lab Builds World Record Tabletop-Size Particle Accelerator

Zothecula writes Taking careful aim with a quadrillion watt laser, researchers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab claim to have managed to speed up subatomic particles to the highest energies ever recorded for a compact accelerator. By blasting plasma in their tabletop-size laser-plasma accelerator, the scientists assert that they have produced acceleration energy of around of 4.25 giga-electron volts. Acceleration of this magnitude over the short distances involved correlates to an energy rise 1,000 times greater than that of a traditional – and very much larger – particle accelerator.

Comments

Tabletop converter, not accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing on the table top takes a laser pulse and uses the energy to accelerate particles to high speed.

The laser is BELLA it takes a building
  http://www.lbl.gov/community/bella/

Still, it's much better that a multi km ring.
    Both size and energy.