Laser light needn’t be as precise as previously thought to drive new breed of miniature particle accelerators, say Berkeley Lab researchers.
Making a tabletop particle accelerator just got easier. A new study shows that certain requirements for the lasers used in an emerging type of small-area particle accelerator can be significantly relaxed. Researchers hope the finding could bring about a new era of accelerators that would need just a few meters to bring particles to great speeds, rather than the many kilometers required of traditional accelerators. The research, from scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), is presented as the cover story in the May special issue of Physics of Plasmas. (more…)
*Brown University physicists have set the strongest limit for the mass of dark matter, the mysterious particles believed to make up nearly a quarter of the universe. The researchers report in Physical Review Letters that dark matter must have a mass greater than 40 giga-electron volts. The distinction is important because it casts doubt on recent results from underground experiments that have reported detecting dark matter.*
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — If dark matter exists in the universe, scientists now have set the strongest limit to date on its mass.
In a paper to be published on Dec. 1 in Physical Review Letters (available in pdf), Brown University assistant professor Savvas Koushiappas and graduate student Alex Geringer-Sameth report that dark matter must have a mass greater than 40 giga-electron volts in dark-matter collisions involving heavy quarks. (The masses of elementary particles are regularly expressed in term of electron volts.) Using publicly available data collected from an instrument on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and a novel statistical approach, the Brown pair constrained the mass of dark matter particles by calculating the rate at which the particles are thought to cancel each other out in galaxies that orbit the Milky Way galaxy. (more…)
