Berkeley Lab Builds World Record Tabletop-Size Particle Accelerator

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 9, 2014 @02:31AM from the paging-doctor-brown dept.

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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Next step: by TheDarkMaster · 2014-12-09 02:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

Ghostbusters proton weapon

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Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
electrons by Lawrence_Bird · 2014-12-09 02:51 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.