Terahertz Radiation To Enable Portable Particle Accelerators (www.desy.de)

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 14, 2015 @08:30AM from the getting-small dept.

Zothecula writes with this Gizmag story about an interdisciplinary team of researchers who have built the first prototype of a miniature particle accelerator that uses terahertz radiation. "Researchers at MIT in the US and DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) in Germany have developed a technology that could shrink particle accelerators by a factor of 100 or more. The basic building block of the accelerator uses high-frequency electromagnetic waves and is just 1.5 cm (0.6 in) long and 1 mm (0.04 in) thick, with this drastic size reduction potentially benefitting the fields of medicine, materials science and particle physics, among others."

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Re:My ever shrinking HADRON by Rising+Ape · 2015-10-14 10:11 · Score: 3, Insightful

The limitation for the LHC energy is the strength of the bending magnets, and for electron synchrotrons the limit is synchrotron radiation (which increases with the fourth power of energy, so more power in won't get you much further). It's not obvious how this can improve circular accelerators.