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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.
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Here at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab this technology enables us to conduct a wide range of advanced research in a timely fashion. this tabletop-size device will also replace the crappier microwave in the breakroom with the broken turntable. So get with keith or lisa if you need help figuring out how to heat up a burrito and as always...please...no fish.
Good people go to bed earlier.
there has been much research in reducing the size of accelerators since ... forever. These guys are probably only reallly useful for e+/- collisions so it is highly stupid to compare it the LHC or even Tevatron - the appropriate comparison is something like SLC at SLAC. Where these will really find most use (if they can make the laser side practical) is in medicine.
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.
Neglecting the fact that this accelerates electrons, while the LHC works with protons...
And assuming the energy adds linearly...
The resultant particle beam would be all of 0.0607% more powerful.
There's a reason the LHC is huge, it's accelerating protons to about 7TeV, or 0.999999991c, just 3m/s slower than light speed. That's not to say that these little linear accelerators don't have their use, there's no doubt lots of low-energy physics experiments that can be performed with electrons at a paltry 4.25GeV, which can now be done more cheaply and compactly while freeing up the "real" particle accelerators to do more work at the high energy levels that only they are capable of. Sort of like a Farnsworth fusor is a cheap and easy fusion reactor anyone can build if they need an energetic neutron source - but you're unlikely to even look at it if your goal is to do interesting fusion-related research.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Luminosity is a problem. The amount of data you get about a particular energy (like 125 GeV) is a function of both the collision energy and the rate of those collisions.